Tom Stoppard Quotes

154 Sourced Quotes

Alexander: No spunk, simple as that! Your brother's an army deserter!
Michael: Oh yes, I've resigned my commission.
Alexander: He's refusing to return to duty.
Michael: On grounds of ill health, Papa. I'm sick of the Army.
Alexander: No discipline, that's the problem!
Michael: No, it's riddled with discipline, that's the problem. That and Poland.

Tom Stoppard
A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.

Tom Stoppard
When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

Tom Stoppard
They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue.

Tom Stoppard
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Tom Stoppard
How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.

Tom Stoppard
Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question your situation at every turn.

Tom Stoppard
We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.

Tom Stoppard
You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?

Tom Stoppard
Biography is the mesh through which our real life escapes.

Tom Stoppard
The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to be in that part of the plan.

Tom Stoppard
A character on how he chose his university course:
Almost everyone who didn't know what to do, did philosophy. Well, that's logical.

Tom Stoppard
He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about.

Tom Stoppard
We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

Tom Stoppard
A lady, if surprised by melancholy, might go to bed with a chap, once; or a thousand times if consumed by passion. But twice…twice…A lady might think she'd been taken for a tart.

Tom Stoppard
Michael: "March here, march there, present arms, where's your cap?" — you've no idea, the whole Army's obsessed with playing at soldiers.

Tom Stoppard
The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe — responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.

Tom Stoppard
You talked animatedly for some time about language being the aniseed trail that draws the hounds of heaven when the metaphysical fox has gone to earth; he must have thought you were barmy.

Tom Stoppard
In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.

Tom Stoppard
When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.

Tom Stoppard
And for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute...

Tom Stoppard
Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.

Tom Stoppard
Buddy Holly was twenty-two. Think of what he might have gone on to achieve. I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.

Tom Stoppard
Language is a finite instrument crudely applied to an infinity of ideas, and one consequence of the failure to take account of this is that modern philosophy has made itself ridiculous by analysing such statements as, "This is a good bacon sandwich," or, "Bedser had a good wicket."

Tom Stoppard
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty — and, by which definition, a philosopher — dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher.

Tom Stoppard
I know the British press is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him.

Tom Stoppard
You had only two friends in the world, and having killed one you can't afford to irritate the other.

Tom Stoppard
We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction. And time is its only measure.

Tom Stoppard
Alexander: How the world must have been changing while I was holding it still.

Tom Stoppard
Wars are fought for oil wells and coaling stations; for control of the Dardanelles or the Suez Canal; for colonial pickings to buy cheap in and conquered markets to sell dear in. War is capitalism with the gloves off.

Tom Stoppard