Christopher Fry Quotations

Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.

What after all Is a halo? It's only one more thing to keep clean

Between our birth and death we may touch understanding, As a moth brushes a window with its wing

The lines marking a penalty area are a disgrace to the playing fields of a public school.

In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment.

In my plays I want to look at life - at the commonplace of existence-as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

The best Thing we can do is to make wherever we're lost in Look as much like home as we can.

Imagination is the wide-open eye which leads us always to see truth more vividly.

I want to look at life - at the commonplaces of existence - as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time

Has made an honest woman of the supernatural.

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. . . says heaven and earth in one word. . . speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time.

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

I sometimes think/ His critical judgement is so exquisite/ It leaves us nothing to admire except his opinion.

Always fornicate / Between clean sheets and spit on a well-scrubbed floor.

Run on, keep your head down, cross at the double / The bursts of open day between the nights.

I travel light; as light, / That is, as a man can travel who will / Still carry his body around because / Of its sentimental value.

An artist's sensitivity to criticism is, at least in part, an effort to keep unimpaired the zest, or confidence, or arrogance, which he needs to make creation possible; or an instinct to climb through his problems in his own way as he should, and must.

What, after all,is a halo? It's only one more thing to keep clean.

I know your cause is lost, but in the heart / Of all right causes is a cause that cannot lose.

Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement.

Life itself is the real and most miraculous miracle of all. If one had never before seen a human hand and were suddenly presented for the first time with this strange and wonderful thing, what a miracle, what a magnificently shocking and inexplicable and mysterious thing it would be.

Indulgences, not fulfillment, is what the world Permits us.

There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.

The moon is nothing But a circumambulating aphrodisiac Divinely subsidized to provoke the world Into a rising birth-rate

We must each find our separate meaning in the persuasion of our days until we meet in the meaning of the world.

Equality is a mortuary word.

Who apart from ourselves, can see any difference between our victories and our defeats?

Life is a hypocrite if I can't live the way it moves me.

If we could wake each morning with no memory of living before we went to sleep, we might arrive at a faultless day.

It's always our touches of vanity that manage to betray us.

One day I shall burst my bud of calm and blossom into hysteria.

How can we be scrupulous In a life which, from birth onwards, is so determined To wring us dry of any serenity at all?

How nature loves the incomplete. She knows If she drew a conclusion it would finish her.

Day's work is still to do, Whatever the day's doom.

It is the individual man in his individual freedom who can mature with his warm spirit the unripe world.

Religion Has made an honest woman of the supernatural, And we won't have it kicking over the traces again.

The dark is light enough.

The difference between tragedy and comedy is the difference between experience and intuition. In the experience we strive against every condition of our animal life: against death, against the frustration of ambition, against the instability of human love. In the intuition we trust the arduous eccentricities we're born to, and see the oddness of a creature who has never got acclimatized to being created.

In our plain defects we already know the brotherhood of man.

My trouble is I'm the sort of writer who only finds out what he's getting at by the time he's got to the end of it.

What is madness To those who only observe, is often wisdom To those to whom it happens.

I travel light; as light, that is, as a man can travel who will still carry his body around because of its sentimental value.

Coffee in England is just toasted milk.

In my plays I want to look at life at the commonplace of existence as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time.

Thank God our time is now when wrong comes up to meet us everywhere never to leave us till we take, the greatest stride of the soul man ever took. affairs are now soul size the enterprise is exploration unto God. Where are you making for? It takes so many thousand years to wake. But will you wake for pity's sake?

The first of our senses which we should take care never to let rust through disuse is that sixth sense, the imagination. I mean the wide-open eye which leads us to see truth more vividly, to apprehend more broadly, to concern ourselves more deeply, to be, all our life long, sensitive and awake to the powers and responsibilities given to us as human beings.

Where in this small-talking world can I find A longitude with no platitude?

The skirts of the gods Drag in our mud. We feel the touch And take it to be a kiss.

How can a man learn navigation Where there's no rudder?

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement . . . says heaven and earth in one word . . . speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time.