Christopher Fry

Christopher Fry (December 18, 1907 – June 30, 2005), born Christopher Harris, in Bristol, was an English playwright. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1962, and the Benson Medal in 2000.

Quotes

• Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.
  • In TIME magazine, New York (April 3, 1950)

• I hope
  I've done nothing so monosyllabic as to cheat,
  A spade is never so merely a spade as the word
  Spade would imply.
  • Venus Observed (1950), act 2, sc. 1
  • Cf. "Call a spade a spade"

• I tell you,
  Miss, I knows an undesirable character
  When I see one; I've been one myself for years.
  • Venus Observed (1950), act 2, sc. 1

• The difference between tragedy and comedy is the difference between experience and intuition. In the experience we strive against every condition of our animal life: against death, against the frustration of ambition, against the instability of human love. In the intuition we trust the arduous eccentricities we're born to, and see the oddness of a creature who has never got acclimatized to being created.
  • In Vogue magazine (January 1951)

• Try thinking of love, or something.
  Amor vincit insomnia.
  • A Sleep of Prisoners (1951) p. 37
  • Cf. Omnia vincit amor

• Coffee in England is just toasted milk.
  • In The New York Post (29 November 1962)

The Lady's Not for Burning (1949)

• I travel light; as light,
  That is, as a man can travel who will
  Still carry his body around because
  Of its sentimental value.
  • Act 1

• What after all
  Is a halo? It's only one more thing to keep clean.
  • Act 1

• What is official
  Is incontestable. It undercuts
  The problematical world and sells us life
  At a discount.
  • Act 1

• Where in this small-talking world can I find
  A longitude with no platitude?
  • Act 3

• The moon is nothing
  But a circumambulating aphrodisiac
  Divinely subsidized to provoke the world
  Into a rising birth-rate.
  • Act 3 (spoken by Thomas Mendip)

• I hear
  A gay modulating anguish, rather like music.
  • Act 3

• The Great Bear is looking so geometrical
  One would think that something or other could be proved.
  • Act 3

• The best
  Thing we can do is to make wherever we're lost in
  Look as much like home as we can.
  • Act 3

See also

• Margaret Thatcher, "The lady's not for turning"

External links

• Christopher Fry on IMDb
• Christopher Fry Obituary from The Telegraph