Stoppard, Tom (Tom Stoppard; Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead)

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's like being ambushed by a grotesque.
-- Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Audiences know what they expect and that is all they are prepared to believe in.
-- Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?
-- Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go, when things have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably get.
-- Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Good God! We're out of our depths here!
-- Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

If this is our destiny, then that was his, and if there are no explanations for us, let there be none for him.
-- Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

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.'
-- Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

We are tragedians, you see? We follow directions. There is no choice involved. The bad end unhappily, the good, unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
-- Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

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.
-- Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

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.
-- Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

We're actors
-- Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.
-- Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

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. What does one make of that? We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the words for it, out we come with the knowlegde that for all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time its only measure.
-- Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Words. Words. They're all we have to go on.
-- Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead