Welcome to Opening Monologue, your ultimate source for The Man monologues! We've gathered the most popular ones for you right here.
No fear! Shan’t ‘ave no need for it like as not.
All right, little Daisy; you can’t be expected to see things like we do.
What’s life, anyway? I’ve seen a thousand lives taken in five minutes.
I’ve seen dead men on the wires like flies on a flypaper.
I’ve been as good as dead meself a hundred times.
I’ve killed a dozen men. It’s nothin’.
He’s safe, if ‘e don’t get my blood up.
If he does, nobody’s safe; not ‘im, nor anybody else; not even you.
I’m speakin’ sober.
Brilliance -I’ll tell you what that was, at least for me. I wrote several things that people called “brilliant.” One in particular, a little play of decadent epigram. It was acted amateurs before an admiring “select” audience. That was when I was twenty-one. From about sixteen on I had been acutely miserable -physically miserable. I never knew when I wouldn’t actually cave in. I felt like a bankrupt living on borrowed money. Of course, it’s plain enough now -the revolt of starved nerves. I cared only for my mind, grew only in that, and the rest of me withered up like a stalk in dry soil. So the flower drooped too -in decadent epigram. But nobody pointed out the truth of it all to me, and I scorned to give my body a thought. People predicted a brilliant future -for me, crying inside! Then I married. I married the girl who had taken the star part in the play. According to the logic of the situation, it was inevitable. Everybody remarked how inevitable it was. A decorative girl, you know. She wanted to be the wife of a great man…. Well, we didn’t get along. There was an honest streak in me somewhere which hated deception. I couldn’t play the part of “brilliant” young poet with any success. She was at me all the while to write more of the same thing. And I didn’t want to. The difference between the “great” man I was supposed to be and the sick child I really was, began to torture. I knew I oughtn’t to go on any further if I wanted to do anything real. Then one night we had an “artistic” dinner. My wife had gotten hold of a famous English poet, and through him a publisher. The publisher was her real game. I drank champagne before dinner so as to be “brilliant.” I was. And before I realized it, Norah had secured a promise from the publisher to bring out a book of plays. I remember she said it was practically finished. But it wasn’t, only the one, and I hated that. But I sat down conscientiously to write the book that she, and apparently all the world that counted, expected me to write. Well, I couldn’t write it. Not a blessed word! Something inside me refused to work. And there I was. In a month or so she began to ask about it. Norah thought I ought to turn them out while she waited. I walked up and down the park one afternoon wondering what to tell her…. And when I realized that either she would never understand or would despise me, I grew desperate. I wrote her a note, full of fine phrases about “incompatibility,” her “unapproachable ideals,” the “soul’s need of freedom” -things she would understand and wear a heroic attitude about -and fled. I came here….
A man’s life is a rhythm. Eating, sleeping, working, playing, loving, thinking -everything. And when we live so that each activity comes at the right interval, we gain power. When one interrupts another, we lose. Weakness is merely the thrust of one impulse against another, instead of their combined thrust against the world. When I came here, feeling like a criminal, I was obeying the one right instinct in a welter of emotions. It was like the faintest of heart beats in a sick body. I listened to that. Then I learned physical hunger, then sleep, and so on. It’s incredible how stupid I was about the elemental art of living! I had to begin all over from the beginning, as if no one had ever lived before. Exactly! I learned that “good” is the rhythm of the man’s personal nature, and that “evil” is merely the confusion of the same impulses. As time went on it became instinctive to live for and the rhythm. Everything about my life here was caught up and used in the vision of power -drawing water, cutting wood, digging in the garden, dawn. It was all marvelous -I couldn’t help writing those poems. They are the natural joys and sorrows of ten years. As a matter of fact, though, I grew to care less and less about writing, as living became fuller and richer. People write too much. They would write less if they had to make the fire in the morning.