Clifford Odets citations

“Any idiot can face a crisis—it’s day to day living that wears you out.”

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Clifford Odets

“If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul.”

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Clifford Odets

“Boychick, wake up! Be something! Make your life something good. For the love of an old man who sees in your young days his new life, for such love take the world in your two hands and make it like new. Go out and fight so life shouldn't be printed on dollar bills.”

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Clifford Odets

Jacob, in Awake and Sing! (1935), Act I

“…life is lonely, life is empty. Love isn't everything. A dear true friend is more than love--the serge outlasts the silk.”

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Clifford Odets

“I believe in the vast potentialities of mankind. But I see everywhere a wide disparity between what they can be and what they are. That is what I want to say in writing. I want to say the genius of the human race is mongrelized; I want to find out how mankind can be helped out of the animal kingdom into the clear sweet air.”

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Clifford Odets

Letter to John Mason Brown, 1935; cited from Margaret Brenman-Gibson Clifford Odets, American Playwright: The Years from 1906 to 1940 (New York: Atheneum, 1981) p. 337.

“Music is the great cheer-up in the language of all countries.”

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Clifford Odets

Mr. Bonaparte, in Golden Boy (1937), Act I, sc. ii