Tom Stoppard Love/ Quotations Thread

One of my all-time favorite quotes is "We're actors. We're the opposite of people."

Stoppard is brilliant.

teehee I guess I was unclear, I meant Stoppard quotations...but I like those too!

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I believe it's actually:

"The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after. Hopelessly trying to become the sensation."


Personally, I was in total tears after Herzen's final monolouge in "Salvage" in London when he mentions,

"People won't forgive us. I imagine myself the future custodian of a broken statue, a desacrated grave, telling everyone who passes by, 'Yes, yes. All this was destroyed by the revolution.'"


&

One that really spoke to me personally,

"I fell in love with literature, and stayed lovesick all my life. No woman had a more steadfast adorer."

& from R&G Are Dead:

"Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?"



I loooove me some Stoppard!

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Updated On: 1/7/07 at 10:34 PM

Yay! This thread is a great idea.

My personal favorite is from The Real Thing:
"This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It's for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you've done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly...What we're trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might...travel...

And, from just a bit later than the above quote:
"There is, I suppose, a world of objects which have a certain form, like this coffee mug. I turn it, and it has no handle. I tilt it, and it has no cavity. But there is something real here which is always a mug with a handle. I suppose. But politics, justice, patriotism-they aren't even like coffee mugs. There's nothing real there separate from our perception of them. So if you try to change them as though there were something there to change, you'll get frustrated, and frustration makes you violent. If you know this and proceed with humility, you may perhaps alter people's perceptions so they behave a little differently at the axis of behavior where we locate politics or justice, but if you don't know this, then you're acting on a mistake. Prejudice is the expression of this mistake."

"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. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?"

"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 ****? How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money?"

Here are two from him directly, not from one of his plays:

"I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you're either a revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not, you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can't be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary. I forget the third thing."
-Tom Stoppard

"I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might just nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead."
-Tom Stoppard

and two more from "Coast of Utopia":

"The coming revolution is the only religion I pass on to you, and it is a religion without a paradise on the other shore. But do not remain on this shore. Better to perish."
- Herzen in Tom Stoppard's "Coast of Utopia"

"If something true can be understood about art, something will be understood about liberty too."
-Belinsky in Tom Stoppard's "Coast of Utopia"

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Updated On: 1/25/07 at 08:31 PM

Much too long to quote and impossible to distill just a few lines, but the entire "America" monologue from NewFoundLand. One of his most amazing pieces of writing for an actor -- what a set piece and a half.

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I loved Arcadia.

VonTussleGirl said:

"One of my all-time favorite quotes is "We're actors. We're the opposite of people." Stoppard is brilliant."

Yes, he had some great lines on the world of theatre. He also called the business “a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.”

Updated On: 2/16/25 at 11:18 PM