"Every exit is an entry somewhere else"
About this Quote
The line lands like a stage direction disguised as comfort: if you’re leaving, Stoppard implies, you’re also arriving. That sleight of hand is classic Stoppard - not sentimentality, but a reframing that turns loss into geometry. An “exit” sounds final, even punitive; an “entry” suggests permission, possibility, a new scene beginning. By yoking them together, he drains the melodrama from endings and exposes their theatrical mechanics: the story doesn’t stop, it changes angles.
The specific intent feels less like reassurance than instruction. Stoppard’s characters so often flail inside systems they only half-understand - history, ideology, love, the script itself. This sentence nudges the listener toward agency without pretending they control the plot. You may not choose the curtain coming down, but you can choose to treat it as a cue rather than a verdict.
Subtextually, it’s also a writer’s credo about continuity. In theater, exits and entrances are how meaning is made: who leaves, who remains, who arrives late, who misses the moment. Stoppard turns that craft truth into a moral one. The world is a series of re-blockings, and identity is partly a matter of where you stand when the lights shift.
Context matters because Stoppard wrote in an era obsessed with endings - the collapse of grand narratives, the betrayals of political certainty, the quiet erosion of private faith. His wit often works by refusing the clean terminus. Here, he offers a neat epigram that sounds Zen but plays like dramaturgy: closure is just a change of set.
The specific intent feels less like reassurance than instruction. Stoppard’s characters so often flail inside systems they only half-understand - history, ideology, love, the script itself. This sentence nudges the listener toward agency without pretending they control the plot. You may not choose the curtain coming down, but you can choose to treat it as a cue rather than a verdict.
Subtextually, it’s also a writer’s credo about continuity. In theater, exits and entrances are how meaning is made: who leaves, who remains, who arrives late, who misses the moment. Stoppard turns that craft truth into a moral one. The world is a series of re-blockings, and identity is partly a matter of where you stand when the lights shift.
Context matters because Stoppard wrote in an era obsessed with endings - the collapse of grand narratives, the betrayals of political certainty, the quiet erosion of private faith. His wit often works by refusing the clean terminus. Here, he offers a neat epigram that sounds Zen but plays like dramaturgy: closure is just a change of set.
Quote Details
| Topic | New Beginnings |
|---|---|
| Source | Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (play), Tom Stoppard — contains line "Every exit is an entry somewhere else". |
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