Eugene O'Neill

I'm thinking 'tis only slaves do be giving heed to the day that's gone or the day to come.

LARRY--(with increasing bitter intensity, more as if he were fighting with himself than with Hickey) I'm afraid to live, am I?--and even more afraid to die! So I sit here, with my pride drowned on the bottom of a bottle, keeping drunk so I won't see myself shaking in my britches with fright, or hear myself whining and praying: Beloved Christ, let me live a little longer at any price! If it's only for a few days more, or a few hours even, have mercy, Almighty God, and let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet treasure, this jewel beyond price, the dirty, stinking bit of withered old flesh which is my beautiful little life! (He laughs with a sneering, vindictive self-loathing, staring inward at himself with contempt and hatred. Then abruptly he makes Hickey again the antagonist.) You think you'll make me admit that to myself?

Stay passed out, that's the right dope. There ain't any cool willow trees- except you grow your own in a bottle.

To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory "pipe dreams" is right also.

The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!

If dat ghost have money, I tells him never to haunt you less'n he wants to lose it!

You can't be too careful about work. It's the most dangerous habit known to medical science.

You're worse than decent. You're virtuous.

Dey's some things I don't got to be told. I kin read them in folks' eyes.

It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!

He thinks money spent on a home is money wasted. He's lived too much in hotels. Never the best hotels, of course. Second-rate hotels. He doesn't understand a home. He doesn't feel at home in it. And yet, he wants a home. He's even proud of having this shabby place. He loves it here.

I am so far from being a pessimist...on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life.

Happy roads is bunk. Weary roads is right. Get you nowhere fast. That's where I've got__owhere. Where everyone lands in the end, even if most of the suckers won't admit it.