Edward Albee Quotes

I've told everyone that I grew old on 'Hee Haw,' but I could've grown old without it.

Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy magazine pieces.

Things ain't what they used to be and never were.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

The older I get the better I used to be!

I once joked in a book that there are three things you can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he is ready to see you, and you can't go home again. Since the spring of 1995, I have been quietly, even gamely, reassessing point number three.

I used to love getting older.

The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.

We have lived too long. The great days are past.

How come I end up where I started How come I end up where I belong... You used to be alright What happened?

Mercy, mercy me, things ain't what they used to be.

The chorus of “Jack and Diane” is: Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone. Are you kidding me? The thrill of living was high school? Come on, Mr. Cougar Mellencamp. Get a life.

To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again.

Old Rose: It's been 84 years, and I can still smell the fresh paint. The china had never been used. The sheets had never been slept in. Titanic was called the Ship of Dreams, and it was. It really was.

I was made to believe that my life was going to be fixed and it wasn't. I'm still the same loser who had flown to Los Angeles on my sister's frequent flier miles just six days before.

Just sitting around waiting for my life to begin, while it was all just slipping away.

And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking into these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!

It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and it's over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.

Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also call'd No-more, Too-late, Farewell.

For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!

I should have known right then it was too good to last, God, it's such a drag when you're livin' in the past

Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.

Well, I hope you like it here, Leo. It used to be .......really nice.

I've got everything I had 20 years ago, except now it's all lower.

Suppose there aren't any more A + days once you get to be twelve? Wouldn't that be something! To spend the rest of your life looking for an A + day and not finding it.