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Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?Tom Stoppard
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We're actors – we're the opposite of people!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.Tom Stoppard
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Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats. Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats.Tom Stoppard
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For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.Tom Stoppard
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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
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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
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GUIL: It [Hamlet's madness] really boils down to symptoms. Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mistaken identities, arguing his father is his mother, that sort of thing; intimations of suicide, forgoing of exercise, loss of mirth, hints of claustrophobia not to say delusions of imprisonment; invocations of camels, chameleons, capons, whales, weasels, hawks, handsaws -- riddles, quibbles and evasions; amnesia, paranoia, myopia; day-dreaming, hallucinations; stabbing his elders, abusing his parents, insulting his lover, and appearing hatless in public -- knock-kneed, droop-stockinged and sighing like a love-sick schoolboy, which at his age is coming on a bit strong. R O S: And talking to himself. G U I L: And talking to himself. .Tom Stoppard
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A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until--" My God, " says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience.. "Look, look! " recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.Tom Stoppard
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There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.Tom Stoppard
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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
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Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.Tom Stoppard
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The bad end unhappily; the good, unluckily. That is what tragedy means.Tom Stoppard
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Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.Tom Stoppard
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Uncertainty is the normal state.Tom Stoppard
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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.Tom Stoppard
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Death is the ultimate negative.Tom Stoppard
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You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.Tom Stoppard
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GUIL (quietly): Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current…Tom Stoppard
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Free to move, speak, Â extemporize, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, Â and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact --Tom Stoppard
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Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are..condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. 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; his two-fold security.Tom Stoppard