Quotes from work
Arcadia

Arcadia is a 1993 play by Tom Stoppard concerning the relationship between past and present, order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty. In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it one of the best science-related works ever written.

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

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Source: Arcadia

“It is a defect of God's humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.”

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Lady Croom, Act II
Source: Arcadia (1993)

“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.”

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Source: Arcadia

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

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Source: Arcadia

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

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Source: Arcadia

“It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.”

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Hannah, Act II.
Source: Arcadia (1993)

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

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Source: Arcadia

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

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Source: Arcadia

“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?”

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Act II
Source: Arcadia (1993)

“I'd push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except the one in the wheelchair, I think I'd lose the sympathy vote before people had time to think it through.”

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Bernard, Act II
Arcadia (1993)

“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.”

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Act I
Arcadia (1993)

“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 Arcadia

Septimus, Act I
Arcadia (1993)

Similar authors

Tom Stoppard116

British playwright 1937

William Golding79

British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Lite… None

Doris Lessing94

British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer … None

Elias Canetti43

Bulgarian-born Swiss and British jewish modernist novelist,… None

A.A. Milne169

British author None

W. Somerset Maugham158

British playwright, novelist, short story writer None

George Bernard Shaw413

Irish playwright None

Harold Pinter25

playwright from England None

John Galsworthy48

English novelist and playwright None

Tennessee Williams139

American playwright None