The cocktail party... is a device either for getting rid of social obligations hurriedly en masse or for making overtures toward more serious social relationships, as in the etiquette of whoring.
Brooks Atkinson
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Brooks Atkinson quotes
Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.
Ethel Waters, the flaming tower of dusky regality, who knows how to make a song stand on tiptoe.
Good plays drive bad playgoers crazy.
In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.
In the 1920s dramatists attacked their subjects as if the inequities could be resolved. Some of the traditional optimism of America lurked behind most of the early plays. But not now. There is no conviction now that the problem will be solved.
It seems not to have been written. It is the quintessence of life. It is the basic truth.
It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.
The cocktail party... is a device either for getting rid of social obligations hurriedly en masse or for making overtures toward more serious social relationships, as in the etiquette of whoring.
There is no joy so great as that of reporting that a good play has come to town.
We cheerfully assume that in some mystic way love conquers all, that good outweighs evil in the just balances of the universe and at the 11th hour something gloriously triumphant will prevent the worst before it happens.
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