You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.
You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!
When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not...
Well, he us a nab, he is mortal, death comes to us all, etcetera, and consequently he would have died anyways, sooner or later. Or to look at it from the social point of view - he's just one man among...
We shed as we pick up, like travelers 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...
VALENTINE: Are you talking about Lord Byron, the poet?BERNARD: No, you fucking idiot, we're talking about Lord Byron, the chartered accountant.
Tom Stoppard’s other work includes: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, After Magritte, The Real Thing, Enter A Free Man, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink (a stage a...
They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue. She made him the happiest man in the whole world and the most wretched, and after a few years she...
The ‘role of the theatre’ is much debated (by almost nobody, of course), but the thing defines itself in practice first and foremost as a recreation. This seems satisfactory. TOM STOPPARD 1993
The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way...
The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, a...
The Almost Free Theatre, the Fun Art Bus and the rest of them were phenomena of a decade which was simultaneously playful and desperately serious; and
Stark raving sane.
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?
PLAYER : It costs little to watch, and little more if you happen to get caught up in the action, if that’s your taste and times being what they are.
I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.
Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order
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.
And for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute...
Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that what is taken to be true. It's the currency дf living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honou...