82 quotes
I know the British press is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him.
Night and Day (1978)
PLAYER: We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
GUIL: What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
PLAYER: Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they reasonably get.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
GUIL: (broken): We’ve traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
PLAYER: The bad end unhappily; the good, unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
PLAYER: So there is an end to that—it’s commonplace: light goes with life, and in the winter of your years the dark comes early.…
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
GUIL: If I might make a suggestion—shut up and sit down. Stop being perverse.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
GUIL: Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
ROS: Half of what he said meant something else, and the other half didn’t mean anything at all.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
I'm showing an interest in your work. I thought you liked me showing an interest in your work. My showing. Save the gerund and screw the whale.
The Real Thing (1982)
GUIL: Obscure promises balanced by vague threats.…
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
PLAYER: We do on stage the 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 and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
ROS: Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
GUIL: Death followed by eternity…the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
Between "just desserts" and "tragic irony" we are given quite a large scope for our particular talent. 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.
GUIL: We act on scraps of information…sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
ROS: 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 and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
GUIL: 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 is like being ambushed by a grotesque.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.
Arcadia (1993)