Tom Stoppard Quotes

If you're in the middle of the ocean with no flippers and no life preserver and you hear a helicopter, this is music. You have to adjust to your needs at the moment.

Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.

Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect.

Many of the young people living in inner-city America don't see themselves - I mean, they even talk about things like death and dying. And there's a tremendous loss of hope. And of all the things to lose, I think nothing is worse or more difficult to overcome than the loss of hope.

Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with a few pieces. The elements couldn't be more simple, nor the stakes higher. Physically it is extraordinarily arduous, and morally it is killing...You get your happiness where you can. You reach a point where you're at the bottom of hell, yet you have your arms crossed and a smile on your face, and you feel you're the luckiest person on earth. Why? Because at your feet you have a tiny dead fish

Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.

Andrius turned. His eyes found mine. I'll see you he said. My face didn't wrinkle. I didn't utter a sound. But for the first time in months I cried. Tears popped from their dry sockets and sailed down my cheeks in one quick stream. I looked away. The NKVD called the bald man's name. Look at me wispered Andrius moving close. I'll see you he said. Just think about that. Just think about me bringing you your drawings. Picture it because I'll be there.

I like to think of birthdays as celebrating life." "Only losers acknowledge they survived a year and hope they cheat death again.

I think I'll stay alive here a bit longer, and see with my own eyes what's going to happen. I can still die after that - it won't be too late. Probably.

He is solid; immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.

There’s always tomorrow.” “Exactly,” she said, finishing off her first doughnut, selecting a second. Maybe she wouldn’t starve to death, she decided. Maybe she’d eat herself into obesity and explode. Death by doughnut.

The man watched him. Real life is pretty bad? What do you think? Well, I think we're still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we're still here. Yeah. You don't think that's so great. It's okay.

Life is like a concentration camp... you can't leave without dying.

Love, I thought, is stronger than death or the fear of death. Only by it, by love, life holds together and advances.

I think humans have always been desperate. I think it has always been about doing something awful if it might help, when the only other option is death. Maybe that's what being a parent is supposed to feel like.

What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.

I really think positive and hope that everything works out. Because you can't really change anything.

Here's another thing to remember: hope keeps you alive. Even when you're dead, it's the only thing that keeps you alive.

We are all mortals, and each is for himself.

I didn’t go up there to die. I went up there to live.

There was no sun; there was no light. I was dying. I couldn't remember what the sky looked like. But I didn't die. I was lost to a sea of cold, and then I was reborn into a world of warmth.

When you die, that does not mean that you lose to cancer.

she held her breath, and in her head, counted seconds. She pretended that for each second she didn’t breathe, God would grant her another day

The boy was lying, fast asleep, on a rude bed upon the floor; so pale with anxiety, and sadness, and the closeness of his prison, that he looked like death; not death as it shews in shroud and coffin, but in the guise it wears when life has just departed; when a young and gentle spirit has, but an instant, fled to Heaven: and the gross air of the world has not had time to breathe upon the changing dust it hallowed.

A man falling off a cliff to certain death will stretch out a hand even to his worst enemy.