Tom Stoppard Quotes

Because I can't hit bottom, I can't be saved.

She gave me this look – she might have been watching from a lifeboat as the ship went down. Or maybe it was the other way around.

For death is not the worst, but when one wants to die and is not able even to have that.

I turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn't know where to die.

The idea of suicide is of a very set narrative, as if killing yourself is a definitive statement. But it can be just as meaningless as throwing a stone in a river.

I had a nightmare about being on a cruise ship and the ship going down. It was an arduous process of the ship going down and we knew it was going down. There was everyone I know and love on the ship.

It seems as if life and hope must cease together.

All hope of remedy is considered vain

If all I can say is I'm not in this swamp, I'm not in this swamp then there is not a rope in front of me and there is not an alligator behind me and there is not a girl sitting at the edge eating a hot dog and if I believe that, then dying would be the only answer because then Death couldn't come and say Peachy to me anymore and after all she has a brother who believes in hope.

Hope is a punishable offense. The verdict is always death; one more death of the heart.

I wanted to die; I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for.

hope is like a piece of string when you’re drowning; it just isn’t enough to get you out by itself.

The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.

We stand, as it were, on the shore, and see multitudes of our fellow beings struggling in the water, stretching forth their arms, sinking, drowning, and we are powerless to assist them.

These have not the hope to die.

We only know how to lose and be lost.

You do not defend a world that is already lost.

The people I am most interested in are the ones on the edge of losing everything and falling into the last bit of despair. I'm trying to write about how people exist on that edge and how they can come back.

Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning. I was much further out than you thought, and not waving but drowning. I was much too far out all my life, And not waving but drowning.

I know I am at the end. I shall never get better, dear.

A lot of people want to die for a lot of reasons.

I want to tell you what it was really like to think death is imminent, but I can't. It's a taste in your mouth. And an emptiness.

I don't know what more to say. I mean, we're all going to die in a world that is worse than when we entered it.

It's a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing nothing.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.