Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966)

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The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

Tom Stoppard
Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?

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

Tom Stoppard
There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said no. But somehow we missed it.

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

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
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
We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

Tom Stoppard
You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.

Tom Stoppard
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
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
Each move is dictated by the previous one—that is the meaning of order

Tom Stoppard
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.

Tom Stoppard
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.

Tom Stoppard
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.

Tom Stoppard
GUIL: The law of averages, if I have got this right, means that if six monkeys were thrown up in the air for long enough they would land on their tails about as often as they would land on their —

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

Tom Stoppard
Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.

Tom Stoppard
The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.

Tom Stoppard
I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can't do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory—they're all blood, you see.

Tom Stoppard
Ros: Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?

Tom Stoppard
Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king." "Yes." "Unorthodox.

Tom Stoppard
Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.

Tom Stoppard
Traitors hoist by their own petard? Or victims of the gods? We shall never know!

Tom Stoppard
All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.

Tom Stoppard
Life is a gamble at terrible odds—if it was a bet, you wouldn't take it.

Tom Stoppard
We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

Tom Stoppard
We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?

Tom Stoppard