Tom Stoppard citations

Page 2

“What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?”

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”

“I'm going to be dead before I read the books I'm going to read.”

“The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.”

“It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”

“For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.”

“Give us this day our daily mask.”

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

“A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.”

“Uncertainty is the normal state.”

“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”

“Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order”

“He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.”

“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.”

“You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.”

“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.”

“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. Envy him; in his two-fold security.”

“An essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.”

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

Thomasina. Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?”

“Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction!

Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.”

“Well, we'll know better next time.”

“I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.”

“Success in life is to maintain this ecstasy, to burn always with this hard gemlike flame.”

“A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.”

“Public postures have the configuration of private derangement.”

“War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero. It takes courage to sit down and be counted.”

“Dotty: Archie says the Church is a monument to irrationality.
George: … The National Gallery is a monument to irrationality! Every concert hall is a monument to irrationality! — and so is a nicely kept garden, or a lover's favour, or a home for stray dogs! You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!”

“Alexander: I myself was educated in Italy. My doctorate in philosophy is from the University of Padua.
Renne: Really? Philosophy?
Alexander: My dissertation was on worms.
Renne: Worms the philosopher?
Alexander: No, just worms.
Renne: Ah, the philosophy of worms.
Alexander: Not at all. Worms have no philosophy, as far as is known.”

“Mageeba: Do you know what I mean by a relatively free press, Mr. Wagner?
Wagner: Not exactly, sir, no.
Mageeba: I mean a free press which is edited by one of my relatives.”