“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.”

“Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.”

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

“Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway.Guildenstern: What?Rosencrantz: England.Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then? ”

“It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God.”

“VALENTINE: Are you talking about Lord Byron, the poet?BERNARD: No, you fucking idiot, we're talking about Lord Byron, the chartered accountant.”

“Whatever became of the momentwhen one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood, when it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory. And yet I can't remember it. It never occurred to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it, before we know that there are words,out we come, bloodied and squalling...with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one directionand time is its only measure.”