Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Quotes

Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.

For all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.

Rosencrantz: Shouldn’t we be doing something–constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? … A short, blunt human pyramid…?

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.

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

We’ve traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.

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.

O God, I could be bound in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams.

Give us this day our daily mask.

Rosencrantz: I don’t believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?

We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there’s only one direction. And time is its only measure.

Be happy — if you’re not even happy, what’s so good about surviving?

We must be born with an intuition of mortality.

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

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

A Chinaman of the T’ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.