#transcribed blather

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Ebb: It is dismaying for me to see something like Mamma Mia and have to wonder where is everything we've ever learned about the theater.  Why has so much of that gone out the window? ... I don't get [shows like that].  They go over my head, and I saw Mamma Mia three times. Kander: Why? Ebb: Because I kept looking for the virtue of it.  I kept asking myself, why is this show so successful?  What kind of chemistry is this? Kander: Freddy, that's like looking for the caviar in a peanut butter sandwich.

Kander and Ebb in conversation, as told to Greg Lawrence, in Colored Lights, 225-6

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One of those libretti that heroically rises above explaining anything at all.

Robert Thicknesse, The Times Opera Notes, on Simon Boccanegra

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The enduring is not a substitute for the transient, Neither one for the other.

T. S. Eliot, A Note on War Poetry

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But I would rather turn to the second of July, the day on which it became clear to me that my life depended on the number of remaining matches.  This thought occurred to me, like all unpleasant thoughts, at 4 o'clock in the morning.

Marlene Haushofer, Die Wand

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Und doch ist es in manchen Fallen ... notwendig und freundlich, lieber nichts zu schreiben, als nicht zu schreiben.

Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Johann Wolfgang Goethe

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I recently came upon a diary I'd written when I was twelve.  I wrote in despair, concerned that I had reached my literary peak, that I'd written the best stories I would ever write.  This diary of course, will be summarily destroyed. ... The sense of being a "has-been" is somewhat tautological; one is always a has-been in that one has always just-been ... so that if ever one is not in the present moment, then one is perpetually a "has-been" or a "will-be." Is it better to be a will-be than a has-been?  And why is there no word for being in a state of being, an is-being?

Sarah Ruhl, from “Confessions of a twelve-year-old has-been” in 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write

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It is true that some very fine actors *do* prefer to be people (rather than trees or gods or seagulls), and it is also true that many playwrights live to please actors (actors are so beautiful and have such disarmingly lovely voices, and we'd always hoped to be them, and if not to be them, then to love them from a short distance in the dark).  So we want to please them, and we hope to give them the gift of people, if it is people that they want.

Sarah Ruhl, from “People in Plays” in 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write

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Small, forthright words, used in the service of condensing experience, might have an idea buried in them as large as the most expansive work that wears its intellectualism on its sleeve.  The unshed tears of the deeply felt are akin to the unused large words in the service of a thought.

Sarah Ruhl, from “Plays of ideas” in 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write