"The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say."

-TOM STOPPARD

"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. "

-TOM STOPPARD,

Arcadia

"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, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks."

-TOM STOPPARD,

Arcadia

"If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older."

-TOM STOPPARD

"Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little..."

-TOM STOPPARD,

The Real Thing

"I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love. Love above all...  Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture. Love- like there has never been in a play."

-TOM STOPPARD

"Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature's highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we're expected! But there is no such place, that's why it's called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us."

-TOM STOPPARD,

The Coast of Utopia

Rosencrantz: “Do you think death could possibly be a boat?"
Guildenstern: "No, no, no. Death is not. Death isn't. Take my meaning? Death is the ultimate negative, not being. You can't not be on a boat."
Rosencrantz: "I've frequently not been on boats."
Guildenstern: "No, no. What you've been is not on boats."

-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.”

-TOM STOPPARD,
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. It never occurred to me at all. What does one make of that? We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the words for it, before we know that there are words, out we come, bloodied and squalling with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.”

-TOM STOPPARD,
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

“Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”

-TOM STOPPARD,

Artist Descending a Staircase

"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."

-TOM STOPPARD,
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead