24 quotes
ROS (an anguished cry): Consistency is all I ask!
GUIL (low, wry rhetoric): Give us this day our daily mask.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds—if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
ROS: Be happy—if you’re not even happy, what’s so good about surviving?
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
ROS: I want a good story, with a beginning, middle and end.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
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)
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)
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)