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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
24f7f09	Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory. And yet, I can't remember it.			Tom Stoppard
32cc7ee	Give us this day our daily mask.			Tom Stoppard
e939cca	Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn't bring death home to anyone- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says- 'One day you are going to die.			Tom Stoppard
3982f3c	If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks into beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.			Tom Stoppard
ae771e3	It's to do with knowing and being known. I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in biblical Greek knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew so-and-so. Carnal knowledge. It's what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face. Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public. We share our..			Tom Stoppard
8c1b1c6	Uncertainty is the normal state.			Tom Stoppard
6af6034	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 come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?		time	Tom Stoppard
a4adb4e	Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the b..		heaven god failure	Tom Stoppard
60c2fc3	There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance - and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don't you see?! We're act..		actors	Tom Stoppard
5640106	Autumnal -- nothing to do with leaves. It is to do with a certain brownness at the edges of the day ... Brown is creeping up on us, take my word for it ... Russets and tangerine shades of old gold flushing the very outside edge of the senses... deep shining ochres, burnt umber and parchments of baked earth -- reflecting on itself and through itself, filtering the light. At such times, perhaps, coincidentally, the leaves might fall, somewher..			Tom Stoppard
4673240	Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order			Tom Stoppard
f90b5ba	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.		truth	Tom Stoppard
b2dc909	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
d1f6491	He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.			Tom Stoppard
fb12b25	Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that what is taken to be true. It's the currency df living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?			Tom Stoppard
0a01202	THOMASINA: ....the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! -- can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -- thousands of poems -- Aristotle's own library!....How can we sleep for grief? SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! ..		grief-and-loss	Tom Stoppard
d04498a	You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.		royalty perversion	Tom Stoppard
629a50f	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.		stoppard plays	Tom Stoppard
d47a73d	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.			Tom Stoppard
954ca31	James] Joyce... an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized....			Tom Stoppard
8026c37	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,..		madness humour plays	Tom Stoppard
758d599	It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead, which should make all the difference, shouldn't it? I mean, you'd never know you were in a box would you?... Even taking into account the fact that you're dead, it isn't a pleasant thought. Especially if you're dead, really. Ask yourself, if I asked you straight off-- I'm going to stuff yo..			Tom Stoppard
66613eb	Well, we'll know better next time.			Tom Stoppard
7e9a8d2	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 died, and then, when he was thirty, he died, too. But by that time Catullus had invented the love poem.			Tom Stoppard
4fc9b22	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.		sex humour satisfaction reputation honour	Tom Stoppard
40d1d1a	Success in life is to maintain this ecstasy, to burn always with this hard gemlike flame.			Tom Stoppard
17fa31b	Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure. Fermat's last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y and z are whole numbers each raised to power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2.		sex maths	Tom Stoppard
2c20254	It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God.		uselessness knowledge	Tom Stoppard
b98549c	Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.		death life eternity experience	Tom Stoppard
b641508	It could have been--it didn't have to be .... It could have been--a bird out of season, dropping bright-feathered on my shoulder.... It could have been a tongueless dwarf standing by the road to point the way.... I was . But it's this, is it? No enigma, no dignity, nothing classical, portentous, only this--a comic pornographer and a rabble of prostitutes....			Tom Stoppard
520d3f3	Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me--I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you.		sex temptation intercourse genitals vagina	Tom Stoppard
8f8b5c3	I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.			Tom Stoppard
afbe29a	Your opinions are your symptoms.		tom-stoppard	Tom Stoppard
0743cfe	I will take his secret to the grave, telling people I meet on the way.			Tom Stoppard
cd899cc	We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?			Tom Stoppard
930ac93	A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma.			Tom Stoppard
8f72996	We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.			Tom Stoppard
45c5718	Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.			Tom Stoppard
b8abd4d	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
0d729df	When people discuss his plays, he says that he feels like he's standing at customs watching an official ransack his luggage. He cheerfully declares responsibility for a play about two people, and suddenly the officer is finding all manner of exotic contraband like the nature of God and identity, and while he can't deny that they're there, he can't for the life of him remember putting them there. In the end, a play is not the product of an i..			Tom Stoppard
2aaadac	The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to be in that part of the plan.			Tom Stoppard
a123a38	There are no commitments, only bargains. And they have to be made again every day. You think making a commitment is it. Finish. You think it sets like a concrete platform and it'll take any strain you want to put on it. You're committed. You don't have to prove anything. In fact you can afford a little neglect, indulge in a little bit of sarcasm here and there, isolate yourself when you want to. Underneath it's concrete for life. I'm a cow ..		relationships communication	Tom Stoppard
bbf71d7	Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.		sex carnal-embrace carnal-knowledge coitus intercourse meat flesh	Tom Stoppard
a66d14c	Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king." "Yes." "Unorthodox."		unorthodox tom-stoppard	Tom Stoppard

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