--- title: 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead' author: Ben type: quotes date: 2020-07-11T15:32:14+00:00 url: /quotes/rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead/ categories: - Uncategorised ---

You don’t understand the humiliation of it—to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable—that somebody is watching

Guil

The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people’s.

Player

Uncertainty is the normal state. You’re nobody special.

Guil

But for God’s sake what are we supposed to do!

Player

Relax. Respond. That’s what people do. You can’t go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

> [Death is] just a man failing to reappear, that’s all—now you see him, now you don’t that’s the only thing that’s real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back—an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.

Ros

We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?

Guil

No, no, no…Death is…not. Death isn’t. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can’t not-be on a boat.

Ros

I’ve frequently not been on boats.

Guil

No, no, no—what you’ve been is not on boats.

Ros

But what’s the point?

Guil

Don’t apply logic.

Ros

He’s done nothing to us.

Guil

Or justice.

Ros

It’s awful.

> (_Quietly_) Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current…