Zoe Akins

Zoe Byrd Akins (October 30, 1886 – October 29, 1958) was an American playwright, poet, and author. She won the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for drama for The Old Maid.

Akins (circa 1907)

Quotes

• I am the wind that wavers,
  You are the certain land;
  I am the shadow that passes
  Over the sand.
  • "I Am the Wind", Interpretations (1912)

• The Greeks had a word for it.
  • Title of play (1930). Cf. The Greeks Had a Word for Them (1932 film), Three Blind Mice (1938 film), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953 film)

Déclassée (1919)

• To accuse is so easy that it is infamous to do so where proof is impossible!
  • Act 1 (Lady Helen)

• My life is like water that has gone over the dam and turned no mill wheels. Here I am, not happy, but not unhappy, as my days run on to the sea, idly—but not too swiftly—for I love living.
  • Act 1 (Lady Helen)

• Englishmen are like that. They love life more and value it less than any other people in the world.
  • Act 2 (Lady Helen)

• Like a fool I thought I was the arbiter of her destiny; and all the time Fate had happier plans for her.
  • Act 3 (Solomon)

The Portrait of Tiero (c. 1920)

• My cousin Cleofante does not believe in inspiration. She shuns the false energy of all stimulants, even those of criticism and sympathy, when she sets herself to a task. What she does, she does alone—unencouraged, unadvised, unmoved. She has a man’s broad and vital technique, and a man’s ability for thinking straight and far. For years I have watched her work,—coldly, intelligently, solely with the power of her brain,—achieving effects that are in no way miracles, but are matters of technique and deliberation.
  • (Sentoni)

• Work alone qualifies us for life, Sentoni. It is much more exquisite to be blown from the tree as a flower than to be shaken down as a shriveled and bitter fruit.
  • (Cleofante)

Daddys Gone A-Hunting (1921)

• ... there's a great strangeness about love. ... Yes, I'm very sure that love is the strangest thing in the world—much stranger than death—or—or just life.
  • Act 1 (Edith)

• It's all right to tell a wife the brutal truth, but you've got to go sort of easy with your lady-love.
  • Act 2 (Oscar)

• Shutting one's eyes is an art, my dear. I suppose there's no use trying to make you see that—but that's the only way one can stay married.
  • Act 2 (Mrs. Dahlgren)

• This world is a very unsafe place. It's all shifting sands, Ned. Shifting sands and changing winds.
  • Act 3 (Edith)

Greatness (1922)

• TILLERTON: "To him that hath it shall be given—" She hath ... that's all. That's greatness.
  PRESCOTT: One sort of greatness, maybe.
  TILLERTON: Even the great can have only their own sort of greatness.
  PRESCOTT: And it's often only that they're great sponges.
  TILLERTON: Often, yes, or great roses for whose blooming the trees have been pruned and stripped. But they make the beauty of the world and that's enough.
  • Act 1

• The success haters. ... That's what I call them—the people who have never got what they want and turned sour on everybody who has. The world's full of them. ... As soon as you've made good they begin to watch for you to fail. ...
  • Act 1 (Canava)

• And I wonder if peace is enough for any man. ...
  • Act 2 (Tillerton)

• No one can ever help loving anyone.
  • Act 3 (Raymond)

The Hills Grow Smaller (1937)

• Forgetting is the cost
  Of living cheerfully.
  • Title poem

• The nostalgia—
  not of memories
  But of what has never been!
  • "The Tomorrows"

• So much do I love wandering,
  So much I love the sea and sky,
  That it will be a piteous thing
  In one small grave to lie!
  • "The Wanderer"

• And they shall know that in the ordering
  Of every world to come the law shall read
  That he who dares be lawless wears the wing
  Of bird and prophet and his light shall lead
  On through the darkness to eventual light,
  To undiscovered wealth, to newer need. ...
  • "The Anarchist", III, sts. 15–16

• Mine was a love so exquisite that I
  Rather than watch it wither chose to die:
  So dress my grave, O friend, with no poor flower
  Which in your quiet garden blooms an hour!
  • "Epitaph"

• And have we lost the right
  To look on a blooming bough
  Without remembering how
  Once with high promising
  We were a part of spring—
  We who are now the dead
  Leaves of other years strewn where flowers spread?
  • "Jazz Nocturne", st. 3

• I know not where I go; I scarcely feel
  The menacing fatigue about my feet,
  The skies that scourge, the distances that cheat, the constant wounds that never hurt nor heal.
  • "Lethargy", st. 2

• Indifferent to all the fun of chance
  I watched black spiders of inertia spin
  The far-flung web which I was strangling in.
  • "Indifference", st. 1

• In all my locked-up songs
  No one but you belongs.
  • "To. H.R.", st. 1

External links

• Zoe Akins, The Portrait of Tiero, in Theatre Arts Magazine, vol. 4, no. 4 (October 1920), p. 316

• Zoe Akins, Déclassée, Daddys Gone A-Hunting: and Greatness—A Comedy (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923)

• Elaine Partnow, The Quotable Woman, 1800–1975 (Los Angeles: Corwin Books, 1977), pp. 199–200

• Rosalie Maggio, The New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), pp. 266, 484, 573, 733, 759