A Quote by Tom Stoppard

I have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn't happen prematurely. — © Tom Stoppard
I have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn't happen prematurely.
I own a hundred and fifty books, but I have no bookcase. Nobody will lend me a bookcase.
My grandfather killed himself falling off the dike in Ostend while photographing my two cousins. This can happen so easily when looking through a lens: for a split second nothing else exists outside the frame.
I do not fall. I fell so hard so long ago there is nothing left for me to land on. I just keep falling and falling and falling.
Falling in love with a story is like falling in love with a person. It tends to occupy your life, your thoughts. You can't do anything else for a long time.
life is long between the desire and the spasm.
Envy, envy eats them alive. If you had money, they’d envy you that. But since you don’t, they envy you for having such a good, bright, loving daughter. They envy you for just being a happy man. They envy you for not envying them. One of the greatest sorrows of human existence is that some people aren’t happy merely to be alive but find their happiness only in the misery of others.
Going gray is like ejaculating: you know it can happen prematurely, but when it does it comes as a total shock.
The book must of necessity be put into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, must be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil!
The leaves are falling, falling as from way off, as though far gardens withered in the skies; they are falling with denying gestures. And in the nights the heavy earth is falling from all the stars down into loneliness. We all are falling. This hand falls. And look at others: it is in them all. And yet there is one who holds this falling endlessly gently in his hands.
Envy is the most universal passion. We only pride ourselves on the qualities we possess, or think we possess; but we envy the pretensions we have, and those which we have not, and do not even wish for. We envy the greatest qualities and every trifling advantage. We envy the most ridiculous appearance or affectation of superiority. We envy folly and conceit; nay, we go so far as to envy whatever confers distinction of notoriety, even vice and infamy.
He [Hemingway] used a stand-up work place he had fashioned out of the top of of a bookcase near his bed. His portable typewriter was snugged in there and papers were spread along the top of the bookcase on either side of it. He used a reading board for longhand writing.
If no one knows when a person is going to die, how can we say he died prematurely?
Neither rejoice nor lament prematurely; for whatever may happen, all will be well if we only have health; for happiness exists--merely in the imagination.
We must take precautions against being prematurely honed sharp--since at the same time we are being prematurely honed thin.
When envy lies within a woman's heart it cuts into her soul & gives her a toxic spirit. It is truly something to be disgusted by. I have experienced it so much in my own life that I can sense the energy of envy without any communication from the other person. It lingers in the air to pollute your environment. Envy is a brutal force of bad vibes sucking the love right out of your heart.
You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.
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