Find the perfect quote to float your boat. Shmoop breaks down key quotations from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Language and Communication Quotes
ROS (cracking, high): --over my step over my head body! – I tell you it's all stopping to a death, it's a boding to a depth, stepping to a head, it's all heading to a dead stop – (1.306)
Isolation Quotes
GUIL: A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself. (1.175)
Manipulation Quotes
PLAYER: Now for a handful of guilders I happen to have a private and uncut performance of The Rape of the Sabine Women – or rather woman, or rather Alfred – (Over his shoulder.) Get you...
Fear Quotes
GUIL: Is that what you imagine? Is that it? No fear? ROS: Fear? GUIL (in fury – flings a coin on the ground): Fear! The crack might flood your brain with light! (1.47-49)
Foolishness and Folly Quotes
GUIL: What's the first thing you remember? ROS: Ah. (Pause.) No, it's no good, it's gone. It was a long time ago. GUIL (patient but edged): You don't get my meaning. What is the first thing after a...
Passivity Quotes
GUIL: All this strolling about is getting too arbitrary by half – I'm rapidly losing my grip. From now on reason will prevail. (2.200)
Versions of Reality Quotes
PLAYER: We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entran...
Fate and Free Will Quotes
GUIL: Inside where nothing shows, I am the essence of a man spinning double-headed coins, and betting against himself in private atonement for an unremembered past. (1.56)
Mortality Quotes
ROS: It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead…which should make all the differe...