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Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes not sound...
Tom Stoppard
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Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that what is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?
Tom Stoppard
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It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
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Each move is dictated by the previous one—that is the meaning of order
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Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.
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I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.
Tom Stoppard
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Between "just desserts" and "tragic irony" we are given quite a lot of scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they reasonably get.
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Chater:
You insulted my wife in the gazebo yesterday evening!
Septimus:
You are mistaken. I made love to your wife in the gazebo. She asked me to meet her there, I have her note somewhere, I dare say I could find it for you, and if someone is putting it about that I did not turn up, by God, sir, it is a slander.
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This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. it's for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you've done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly. What we're trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might... travel.
Tom Stoppard
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It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable … it's better to be quotable than honest.
Tom Stoppard
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I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.
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I will take his secret to the grave, telling people along the way. Betrayal is no sin if it is whimsical.
Tom Stoppard
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The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.
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Lending one's bicycle is a form of safe sex, possibly the safest there is.
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If there is any point in using language at all it is that a word is taken to stand for a particular fact or idea and not for other facts or ideas.
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Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
Tom Stoppard
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Mountains are not pyramids and trees are not cones. God must love gunnery and architecture if Euclid is his only Geometry.
Tom Stoppard
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Nature manipulates the x and turns it into y. Then y goldfish is your starting population for the following year... Your value for y becomes your next value for x. The question is what is being done to x? What is the manipulation? Whatever it is, it can be written down as mathematics. It's called an algorithm.
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Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers... Today England looked like a nation of goalkeepers.
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Expectation in the general sense may be considered as a kind of average.
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GUIL: The equanimity of your average tosser of coins depends upon a law, or rather a tendency, or let us say a probability, or at any rate a mathematically calculable chance, which ensures that he will not upset himself by losing too much nor upset his opponent by winning too often.
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Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!
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I can put two and two together, you know. Putting two and two together is my subject. I do not leap to hasty conclusions. I do not deal in suspicion and wild surmise. I examine the data; I look for logical inferences.
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Make a fist, and if your fist is as big as the nucleus of one atom then the atom is as big as St Paul's, and if it happens to be a hydrogen atom then it has a single electron flitting about like a moth in the empty cathedral, now by the dome, now by the altar.
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To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.
Tom Stoppard
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Quote of the day
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Carrie Chapman Catt
Tom Stoppard
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Born:
July 3, 1937
(age 87)
Bio:
Sir Tom Stoppard is a British playwright and screenwriter, knighted in 1997.
Known for:
Arcadia (1966)
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966)
The Real Thing (1980)
Travesties (1975)
The Invention of Love (1997)
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