Arcadia Quotes

• We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. but there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.

  Tom Stoppard

  Fall, Long, Arms

  Tom Stoppard (2013). “Arcadia”, p.52, Faber & Faber

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

  Tom Stoppard

  Mystery, Empty, Lost

  Tom Stoppard (2013). “Arcadia”, p.119, Faber & Faber

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• The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.

  Tom Stoppard

  Coffee, Writing, Clouds

  Tom Stoppard (2013). “Arcadia”, p.62, Faber & Faber

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

  Tom Stoppard

  Matter, Knows

  "Arcadia". Play by Tom Stoppard, 1993.

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

  Tom Stoppard

  Together, Way, Unpredictable

  Tom Stoppard (2013). “Arcadia”, p.62, Faber & Faber

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• I dwell no more in Arcady, But when the sky is blue with May, And birds are blithe and winds are free, I know what message is for me, For I have been in Arcady.

  Louise Chandler Moulton

  Blue, Wind, Sky

  Louise Chandler Moulton (1908). “The Poems and Sonnets of Louise Chandler Moulton ...”

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• Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

  H. L. Mencken

  Dream, Heaven, Democracy

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.412, Knopf

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• When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

  Tom Stoppard

  Thinking, Together Again, Doe

  Tom Stoppard (2013). “Arcadia”, p.12, Faber & Faber

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

  Tom Stoppard

  Heart, Defects

  Tom Stoppard (2013). “Arcadia”, p.91, Faber & Faber

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• The Arcadians were chestnut-eaters.

  Alcaeus

  Chestnuts

  Alcæus, Fragment LXXXVI. "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations", 1922.

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• Years ago I had a house in Sussex, it was like Arcadia, with an old Victorian bridge, a pond and the Downs.

  Nicolas Roeg

  Years, Bridges, House

  "His brilliant career". Interview with Jason Wood, www.theguardian.com. June 2, 2005.

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• Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than quarks, quasars, big bangs and black holes.

  Tom Stoppard

  Thinking, Ideas, Black

  Tom Stoppard (1999). “Tom Stoppard: plays”

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• If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.

  Tom Stoppard

  Clever, Future, Writing

  "Arcadia". Play by Tom Stoppard, 1993.

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• We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.

  Tom Stoppard

  Party, Rain, Sunday

  1993 Arcadia.

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

  Tom Stoppard

  Alive

  Tom Stoppard (2013). “Arcadia”, p.62, Faber & Faber

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• Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.

  Tom Stoppard

  Believe, Valentine, Struggle

  Tom Stoppard (2013). “Arcadia”, p.96, Faber & Faber

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• Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.

  Tom Stoppard

  Practice, Beef, Arms

  Tom Stoppard (2013). “Arcadia”, p.8, Faber & Faber

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• I grew up without the rose-tinted look at the profession many of my friends had, but I've been very lucky playing major roles in 'An Ideal Husband', 'Arcadia' and 'The Memory of Water'.

  Samantha Bond

  Memories, Husband, Water

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• Alas! the road to Anywhere is pitfalled with disaster;
  There's hunger, want, and weariness, yet O we loved it so!
  As on we tramped exultantly, and no man was our master,
  And no man guessed what dreams were ours, as, swinging heel and toe,
  We tramped the road to Anywhere, the magic road to Anywhere,
  The tragic road to Anywhere, such dear, dim years ago.

  Robert W. Service

  Dream, Men, Years

  Robert W. Service (2012). “Robert W. Service: Selected Poetry and Prose”, p.50, Dundurn

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• To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.

  Alexander Theroux

  Lonely, Real, Cities

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• People talk about me in Arcadia and I think I was okay in it but Ive given better performances in other productions that didnt have the same impact. But I knew Arcadia was going to be an event and I wanted to be part of it.

  Rufus Sewell

  Thinking, Impact, People

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• A ghostly side note Soldier boy Miller played a Lucifer-like character in the final two episodes of Joan of Arcadia. Coincidence I do find it strangely poetic, ... that a character who shows up on a show about God to play something kind of satanic winds up in the very last two episodes of that show, and then appears in the show that replaces that show on its exact time and night the following season.

  Wentworth Miller

  Character, Boys, Night

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• There's no doubt about it. Arcadia is Tom Stoppard's richest, most ravishing comedy to date, a play of wit, intellect, language, brio and, new for him, emotion. It's like a dream of levitation: you're instantaneously aloft, soaring, banking, doing loop-the-loops and then, when you think you're about to plummet to earth, swooping to a gentle touchdown of not easily described sweetness and sorrow.

  Vincent Canby

  Dream, Thinking, Play

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