Tom Stoppard Quotes

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?

Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible!

I want a good story, with a beginning, middle and end.

"I got dizzy," he explained.
I should think you did. What were you doing?'
Nothing," said Moon. "I was trying to face one way or the other and I got confused and fell over."
Let that be my epitaph."

Bakunin: Left to themselves people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish. Herzen: Is that the same people or different people? Bakunin: The same people.

It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.

"A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until — "My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience... "Look, look!" recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.

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!

Oh, you're going to zap me with penicillin and pesticides. Spare me that and I'll spare you the bomb and aerosols. But don't confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There's no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle's cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars - big bangs, black holes - who gives a shit? How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money?

I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.

People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.

Traitors hoist by their own petard? — or victims of the gods? — we shall never know!

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 vivacity, grief, sulks, anger, joy ... we hand it out to anybody who happens to be standing around, to friends and family with a momentary sense of indecency perhaps, to strangers without hesitation. Our lovers share us with the passing trade. But in pairs we insist that we give ourselves to each other. What selves? What’s left? What else is there that hasn’t been dealt out like a pack of cards? Carnal knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known. I revere that. Having that is being rich, you can be generous about what’s shared – she walks, she talks, she laughs, she lends a sympathetic ear, she kicks off her shoes and dances on the tables, she’s everybody’s and it don’t mean a thing, let them eat cake; knowledge is something else, the undealt card, and while it’s held it makes you free-and-easy and nice to know, and when it’s gone everything is pain. Every single thing. Every object that meets the eye, a pencil, a tangerine, a travel poster. As if the physical world has been wired up to pass a current back to the part of your brain where imagination glows like a filament in a lobe no bigger than a torch bulb. Pain.

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 questioning your situation at every turn.
Guil: But we don’t know what’s going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don’t know how to act.
Player: Act natural. You know why you’re here at least.
Guil: We only know what we’re told, and that’s little enough. And for all we know it isn’t even true.
Player: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. it’s the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as it is honored.

It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable … it's better to be quotable than honest.