Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

The law of averages, if I have got this right, means that if six monkeys were thrown up in the air for long enough they would land on their tails about as often as they would land on their——
ROS : Heads.

aware but not going to panic about it– his character note.

GUIL : Our names shouted in a certain dawn. . . a message . . . a summons. . . There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said—no. But somehow we missed it.

Death is not anything . . . death is not. . . It’s the absence of presence, nothing more . . . the endless time of never coming back . . . a gap you can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound. . . .

GUIL (leaping up) : What a shambles! We’re just not getting anywhere.
ROS (mournfully) : Not even England. I don’t believe in it anyway.
GUIL : What?
ROS : England.
GUIL : Just a conspiracy of cartographers, you mean?

ROS : He wouldn’t discriminate between us.
GUIL : Even if he could.
ROS : Which he never could.
GUIL : He couldn’t even be sure of mixing us up.
ROS : Without mixing us up.
GUIL (turning on him furiously) : Why don’t you say something original! No wonder the whole thing is so stagnant! You don’t take me up on anything—you just repeat it in a different order.
ROS : I can’t think of anything original. I’m only good in support

(To the grappling LOVERS) All right, no need to indulge yourselves

GUIL : No, no, no . . . you’ve got it all wrong . . . you can’t act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen—it’s not gasps and blood and falling about—that isn’t what makes it death. It’s 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 and GUIL, holding the belts taut, stare at him in some bewilderment.
HAMLET leaves, dragging the body. They relax the strain on the belts.
ROS : That was close.
GUIL : There’s a limit to what two people can do.

PLAYER (to GUIL) : Are you familiar with this play?
GUIL: NO.
PLAYER : A slaughterhouse—eight corpses all told. It brings out the best in us.