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6faac30
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Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over...Death is not anything...death is not...It's the absence of presence, nothing more...the endless time of never coming back...a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound...
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Tom Stoppard |
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9f9cb1e
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The bad end unhappily; the good, unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
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tragedy
good
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Tom Stoppard |
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9aec005
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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 I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author ..
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relationships
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Tom Stoppard |
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c224de9
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GUIL: I think I have it. A man talking sense to himself is no madder then a man talking nonsense not to himself. ROS: Or just as mad. GUIL: Or just as mad. ROS: And he does both. GUIL: So there you are. ROS: Stark raving sane.
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Tom Stoppard |
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b89cd87
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Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.
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Tom Stoppard |
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ac46d85
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Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.
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Tom Stoppard |
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e006899
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We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.
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entry
exit
leaving
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Tom Stoppard |
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8915c7d
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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.
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Tom Stoppard |
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1098fe6
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LADY CROOM: ....My lake is drained to a ditch for no purpose I can understand, unless it be that snipe and curlew have deserted three counties so that they may be shot in our swamp. What you painted as forest is a mean plantation, your greenery is mud, your waterfall is wet mud, and your mount is an opencast mine for the mud that was lacking in the dell. (Pointing through the window) What is that cowshed? NOAKES: The hermitage, my lady? LAD..
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Tom Stoppard |
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9d51bda
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HENRY: Leave me out of it. They don't count. Maybe Brodie got a raw deal, maybe he didn't. I don't know. It doesn't count. He's a lout with language. I can't help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech...W..
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Tom Stoppard |
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7a2710f
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I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.
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Tom Stoppard |
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4a992d0
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Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college, and the play began in natural light. But as it developed, and as it became time for Ariel to say his farewell to the world of The Tempest, the evening had started to close in and there was some artificial lighting coming on. And as Ariel uttered ..
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the-tempest
tom-stoppard
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Tom Stoppard |
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2a1b292
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There must have been a time, in the beginning, when we could have said - no. But somehow we missed it. Oh well, we'll know better next time.
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reincarnation
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Tom Stoppard |
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1627672
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I fell in love with literature and stayed lovesick all my life.
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Tom Stoppard |
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ab11dab
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ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?
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Tom Stoppard |
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2e83c32
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I believe in mess, tears, pain, self-abasement, loss of self-respect, nakedness. Not caring doesn't seem much different from not loving.
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henry
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Tom Stoppard |
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758d7b7
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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.
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Tom Stoppard |
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0aa417a
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Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.
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Tom Stoppard |
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f814f25
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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...
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metaphor
life
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Tom Stoppard |
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2c02491
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GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear
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science
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Tom Stoppard |
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3ac1f5c
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When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at 'meretrix', a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. 'Meretrix'! This was none of your mensa-a-table, this was a flash from a forbidden planet, and it was everywhere. History was sex, French was sex, art was sex, the Bible, poetry, penfriends, games, music, everything was sex except biology which was obviously sex but ..
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sex
love
virginity
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Tom Stoppard |
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b033900
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I extract significance from melodrama, a significance which it does not in fact contain; but occasionally, from out of this matter, there escapes a thin beam of light that, seen at the right angle, can crack the shell of mortality.
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Tom Stoppard |
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070cd96
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Death is the ultimate negative.
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Tom Stoppard |
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86db031
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An artist is the magician put among men to gratify--capriciously--their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? D..
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literature
history
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Tom Stoppard |
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59c9ee2
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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 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. Mathe..
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Tom Stoppard |
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8d9c6c2
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and for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute...
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Tom Stoppard |
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37ad6d1
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HANNAH: ....English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the Grand Tour. Here, look -- Capability Brown doing Claude, who was doing Virgil. Arcadia! And here, superimposed by Richard Noakes, untamed nature in the style of Salvator Rosa. It's the Gothic novel expressed in landscape. Everything but vampires.
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salvator-rosa
rosa
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Tom Stoppard |
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33ac459
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Confession is an act of violence against the unoffending.
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violence
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Tom Stoppard |
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7ab3471
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Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!
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Tom Stoppard |
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e6cb456
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To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.
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Tom Stoppard |
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424f633
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Now for a handful of guilders I happen to have a private and uncut performance of the rape of the Sabine Women - or rather woman, or rather Alfred -Get your skirt on Alfred!
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Tom Stoppard |
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8d3c2d2
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THOMASINA: But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!
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libraries
humor
thomasina
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Tom Stoppard |
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edee59d
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We ransomed our dignity to the clouds.
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Tom Stoppard |
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3f808b7
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Kissing girls is not like science, nor is it like sport. It is the third thing when you thought there were only two.
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romance
love
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Tom Stoppard |
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66f07ab
|
You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neither does it make you an artist.
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Tom Stoppard |
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6ec2b54
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SEPTIMUS: My lady, I was alone with my thoughts in the gazebo, when Mrs Chater ran me to ground, and I being in such a passion, in an agony of unrelieved desire -- LADY CROOM: Oh....! SEPTIMUS: -- I thought in my madness that the Chater with her skirts over her head would give me the momentary illusion of the happiness to which I dared not put a face. (Pause.) LADY CROOM: I do not know when I have received a more unusual compliment, Mr Hodg..
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Tom Stoppard |
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7e18708
|
Guil: ...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. Player: Uncertainty is the normal state. You're nobody special. [He makes to leave again. Guil loses his cool.] Guil: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?! Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questionin..
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Tom Stoppard |
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45b4f05
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Can't you function unless you're losing?
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Tom Stoppard |
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c3e1814
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LADY CROOM: You have been reading too many novels by Mrs Radcliffe, that is my opinion. This is a garden for The Castle of Otranto or The Mysteries of Udolpho -- CHATER: The Castle of Otranto, my lady, is by Horace Walpole. NOAKES: (Thrilled) Mr Walpole the gardener?! LADY CROOM: Mr Chater, you are a welcome guest at Sidley Park but while you are one, The Castle of Otranto was written by whomsoever I say it was, otherwise what is the point ..
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Tom Stoppard |
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a5b810e
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If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.
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Tom Stoppard |
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d2f3715
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Independence isn't all it's cracked up to be, you know. What country could be more independent than Russia? And in Russia now there isn't a squeak or a pinpoint of light. I have nowhere to publish. The Contemporary has stuck its head up out of harm's way. So I've stopped quarrelling with the world. I sat in this chair the first morning I woke up in this house ... and for the first time ... for a long time, there was silence. I didn't have t..
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Tom Stoppard |
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663defe
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Why do I have a sense of impending disaster? Sonders is after my niece and has discovered the secret address where I am sending her to the safe keeping of my sister-in-law Miss Blumenblatt, who has never laid eyes on him, or, for that matter, on Marie either since she was a baby--while I have to leave my business in the charge of my assistant and an apprentice, and follow my new servant, whom I haven't had time to introduce to anyone, to t..
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Tom Stoppard |
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80cb55f
|
HENRY: You don't get visited by happiness like being lucky with the weather. The weather is the weather. DEBBIE: And happiness? HENRY: Happiness is . . . equilibrium. Shift your weight.
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Tom Stoppard |
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9a8715a
|
You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!
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Tom Stoppard |