Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Quotes

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...