Tom Stoppard Quotes

I have been in danger of being drowned twice.

I'm lucky to be alive.

I have had an experience which might perhaps be described as being shot down. At the same time, I call shot down only when one falls down. Today I got into trouble but I escaped with a whole skin.

My biggest fear ever is to be involved in a plane crash, so when that happened... well, I'm just thankful to be alive. I'm just grateful to be here at all.

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

I've cheated the Grim Reaper more times than anyone I know.

There is nothing so satisfying as to be shot at without effect.

My situation should have been a lot worse. By rights I shouldn't have survived the crash.

Nothing is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.

In order to endure death and horror one tends to kill ones own humanity, which is a much greater danger than not being able to bear it.

I've never experienced complete terror, knock on wood, or running for my life or any of that.

I remember one of them - it was a 1941 black Ford. As it went by very slow, a guy leaned out with a shotgun, keeping a bead on us all the time, and we just had to walk slowly and wait for him to kill us... They didn't kill us, but they didn't end it, either.

Ten years ago, I went to visit my dad in Australia. I walked to the edge of a cliff and looked over and tripped. I righted myself but my head was over the edge. No one saw it.

There is nothing better than getting shot at and missed. It's really great.

In my attempt to defend myself, I was badly injured on my left hand. I am shaken but fortunate to be alive.

And I could have died right then. And considering how things went, I really should have.

We just did an awesome job of not dying.

Someone saved my life tonight, sugar bear, you almost had your hooks in me, didn't you dear?

We got off at the next exit, quietly, and, switching drivers, we walked in front of the car. We met and I held him, my hands balled into tight fists around his shoulders, and he wrapped his short arms around me and squeezed tight, so that I felt the heaves of his chest as we realized over and over again that we were still alive. I realized it in waves and we held on to each other crying and I thought, 'God we must look so lame,' but it doesn't matter when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive.

You're never more alive than in battle." "Never more dead after," I say.

Welcome baby it's your turn to live they're laying for you chicken pox whooping cough smallpox malaria TB heart disease cancer and so on unemployment hunger and so on train wrecks bus accidents plane crashes on-the-job injuries earthquakes floods droughts and so on heartbreak alcoholism and so on nightsticks prisons doors and so on they're laying for you the atom bomb and so on welcome baby it's your turn to live they're laying for you socialism communism and so on.

When you're in the battlefield, survival is all there is.

War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.

As I have heard, since my arrival at this place, a circumstantial account of my death and dying speech, I take this early opportunity of contradicting the first, and of assuring you, that I have not as yet composed the latter. But by the All-Powerful Dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability or expectation; for I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet escaped unhurt, although death was leveling my companions on every side of me!

Sharing our depressions felt like having survived a war. The experience bonds you to the other person for life.