Tom Stoppard: Trending quotes
Tom Stoppard trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collectionThe Coast of Utopia: Voyage (2002)
“We're actors — we're the opposite of people!”
Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
“Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?”
Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Lady Croom, Act II
Source: Arcadia (1993)
“An artist is the magician put among men to gratify — capriciously — their urge for immortality.”
Joyce, Act I
Stoppard called this "the most important" speech in the play.
Travesties (1974)
Context: An artist is the magician put among men to gratify — capriciously — their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships — and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes — husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer.
“Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”
Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Henry, Act II, scene V
Source: The Real Thing (1982)
Context: 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.
“Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.”
Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
“We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.”
Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
“Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?”
Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead