Tom Stoppard Quotes

“We’re more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school.”

“Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.”

“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”

“The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.”

“There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.”

“Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.”

“Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”

“Pirates could happen to anyone.”

“We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.”

“It never occurred to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality.”

“Be happy -- if you’re not even happy, what’s so good about surviving?”

“We’re actors — we’re the opposite of people!”

“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.”

“There must have been one, a moment, in childhood, when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever.”

“Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?”

“What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.”

“Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death?”

“Before we know the word for it, before we know that there are words, out we come, bloodied and squalling...with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there’s only one direction and time is its only measure.”

“Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being.”

“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.”