We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.

Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.

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.

We're actors — we're the opposite of people!

I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.

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

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.

Pirates could happen to anyone.

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

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

We do on stage 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.

Words, words. They're all we have to go on.

I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.

The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.

What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?

It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.

It would have been nice to have had unicorns.

It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

...reality, the name we give to the common experience.

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.

What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?

Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?

I'm going to be dead before I read the books I'm going to read.

The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.

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

I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.

A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.

Give us this day our daily mask.

Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.

It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

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

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

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order

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 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.

[James] Joyce... an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized....

He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.

You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.

Septimus. When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be all alone, on an empty shore. Thomasina. Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?

Uncertainty is the normal state.

Success in life is to maintain this ecstasy, to burn always with this hard gemlike flame.

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

If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.

I will take his secret to the grave, telling people I meet on the way.