A thought on the origins of Theatre...

Where does theatre really begin? If you asked Aristotle, he would have said, look at your children. It originates in the make-up, or wiring, of human beings themselves. It's one of the things that makes us human. In the third chapter of his great critical treatise, his Poetics, he writes:

Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation. And it is also natural for all to delight in works of imitation.

-John Sutherland, A Little History of Literature

"Being powerful...

...is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't."

Margaret Thatcher

Unhistoric Acts...

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

-Middlemarch, by G. Eliot

This Made Me Laugh...

"What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences when I am sobbing, a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone."

-Anna Quindlen

Charm

"Charm is a glow within a woman that casts a most becoming light on others."
John Mason Brown


"There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me." John Erskine


"If you have charm, you don't need anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter what else you have." J.M. Barrie


"I'm convinced that it's energy and humor. The two of them combined equal charm." Judith Krantz


"There is no personal charm so great as the charm of a cheerful temperament."
Henry Van Dyke

"Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised." Proverbs 31:30