Tom Stoppard Quotes

There are no signposts in the sea.

If you want to go east, don't go west.

You will move in the direction you are facing.

The sailor cannot see the north / but knows the needle can.

How can I go forward when I don't know which way I'm facing?

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance and it straightens itself to the average tendency.

...go in the direction your head is pointed in.

Direction determines destination.

Anyone who has ever asked for directions knows you need two crucial pieces of information to get good results: a starting point and a destination.

I'd like to have a perfect sense of direction. I could get lost with a GPS strapped to my arm.

We're all pilgrims on the same journey - but some pilgrims have better road maps.

Anytime I feel lost, I pull out a map and stare. I stare until I have reminded myself that life is a giant adventure, so much to do, to see.

I have a terrible sense of direction.

It is impossible to recognize a wrong way without knowing the right way. This means that it is no use troubling oneself how to recognize a wrong way. One must think of how to find the right way.

I know how to find my way into the takedown.

I have an incredible compass. You can put me back in a country I haven't been in 20 years and say, 'Get me from point A to point B,' and I'll take you there.

The lake was always my orienting point when my dad was teaching me how to not get lost. The lake is east, so you'll always know that. It's a weird thing where you can kind of feel where you're at in Chicago, and when I was downtown, I was like, 'Oh, it feels more open over here. That must be east.' It felt like a little secret thing.

Direction, not intention determines your destination.

A traveller, lost on a desert plain, feels that the recognition of one star, the Pole star, is of itself a great acquisition.

I've always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you've been, where you are, and where you're going -- in a sense it's three tenses in one.

We were just looking at maps.

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.

A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively upon awaking and in one second reads in them the point of the earth that he occupies, the time past until his arousal; but their ranks can be mingled or broken.

I always have a sense of trembling, but so does a compass, after all.

Granny Weatherwax was not lost. She wasn't the kind of person who ever became lost. It was just that, at the moment, while she knew exactly where SHE was, she didn't know the position of anywhere else.