John Guare > Quotes

“It's amazing how a little tomorrow can make up for a whole lot of yesterday.”
― John Guare, Landscape of the Body

“I believe that the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world. I believe the imagination is another phrase for what is most uniquely us.”
― John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation: A Play

“The imagination says listen to me. I am your darkest voice. I am your 4 a.m. voice. I am the voice that wakes you up and says this is what I'm afraid of. Do not listen to me at your peril.... The imagination is not our escape. On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to.”
― John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation: A Play

“But if I had to choose between where I live and you, I'd rip up everything I own because the only landscape worth looking is the landscape of the human body. I kiss your Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I kiss your Missouri and Monongahela and Susquehanna and Shenandoah and Rio Grande. I kiss the confluence of all those rivers. I kiss your amber waves of grain. I kiss your spacious skies, your rocket's red glare, your hand I love, your purple mountain'd majesty. But most of all I kiss your head. I kiss the place where we make our decisions. I kiss the place where we keep our resolves. The place where we do our dreams. I kiss the place behind the eyes where we store up secrets and knowledge to save us if we're caught in a corridor on a dark, wintry evening.”
― John Guare, Landscape of the Body

“Ballet is always about the realm of possibilities, the realm of what the human body can do, what the human spirit can do. And it's about listening, it's about listening to remarkable music and how we respond to that.”
― John Guare

“the painter, Cezanne, would leave blank spaces on his canvas when he couldn’t account for the brush strokes, or the color”--- “How much of your life can you account for? My life is a collage of unaccounted for brush strokes; I am all random”.”
― John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation: A Play

“I wanted to be a Bride of Christ but I guess now I'm a young divorcee.”
― John Guare, The House of Blue Leaves

“I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it extremely comforting that we're so close.”
― John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation: A Play

“All these out-of-staters driving in with cameras and thermos bottles and you live right here and you’re all zipped in like a turtle. Miss Henshaw, the old lady who’s the check-out girl at the A & P who gyps everybody—her nephew is a cop and she’s saving us two divine places right by the curb. You’re not the only one with connections. But she can’t save them forever. Oh God, Artie, what a morning! You should see the stars!!! I know all the stars from the time I worked for that astronomer and you should see Orion—O’Ryan: the Irish constellation—I haven’t looked up and seen stars in years! I held my autograph book up and let Jupiter shine on it. Jupiter and Venus and Mars. They’re all out! You got to come see Orion. He’s the hunter and he’s pulling his arrow back so tight in the sky like a Connect-the-Dots picture made up of all these burning planets. If he ever lets that arrow go, he’ll shoot all the other stars out of the sky—what a welcome for the Pope! And right now, the Pope is flying through that star-filled sky, bumping planets out of the way, and he’s asleep dreaming of the mobs waiting for him. When famous people go to sleep at night, it’s us they dream of, Artie. The famous ones—they’re the real people. We’re the creatures of their dreams. You’re the dream. I’m the dream. We have to be there for the Pope’s dream. Look at the light on the Empire State Building swirling around and around like a burglar’s torch looking all through the sky—Everybody’s waiting, Artie—everybody!”
― John Guare, The House of Blue Leaves and Chaucer in Rome: Two Plays