Home

Starting tomorrow, this will be my home for the next two years.

I've gotten through most of the Monster Reading List and found dozens and dozens of monologues for my files. I'm prepared. (Although sitting at my computer the night before my MFA program begins, "Are you prepared?" doesn't really seem to be the right question. Maybe a better question is, "Are you ready?" Because in some ways, I don't think I'll ever be 'prepared' for this. But I'm definitely ready!)

In honor of the many, many books I read this summer, and as a reminder to myself, here are some of my favorite passages:

Without an intuitive leap of faith, work remains academic. Have the courage to make choices that you cannot justify at the time. These choices constitute a leap. - Anne Bogart

One person cannot define a relationship, he can only suggest how he would like it to be defined, and suggest it in such powerful terms that the other person will accept that definition. - Robert Cohen

Time after time I have worked with actors who after the usual preamble that they ‘put themselves in my hands’ are tragically incapable however hard they try of laying down for one brief instant even in rehearsal the image of themselves that has hardened round an inner emptiness. - Peter Brook

We are never so filled with other people’s presence as when we see them ecstatic. - Robert Cohen

The force of poetry is in its exactness. - Jeannette Winterson

Because you have a body, you do not need transitions. - Heiner Muller

The theatre begins with a disagreement between what you see and what you hear. -
Friedrich Durrenmatt

Art is violent. To be decisive is violent. Antonin Artuad defined cruelty as ‘unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness’. To place a chair at a particular angle on the stage destroys every other possible choice, every other option. - Anne Bogart

You will occasionally be embarrassed by the search in the dark because of what you bump into. - Anne Bogart

Never lie. Never say something moved you if you are still in the same place. - Jeannete Winterson