Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 156

I dont believe in God. Can you understand that? Look around you man. Cant you see? The clamour and din of those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear. And I loathe these discussions. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place. Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. And if that pain were actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might yet be capable of engendering until it was not even ash. And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. Show me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There's a church I might enter. Yours prepares one only for more life. For dreams and illusions and lies. If you could banish the fear of death from men's hearts they wouldnt live a day. Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next? The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy. Every road ends in death. Or worse. Every friendship. Every love. Torment, betrayal, loss, suffering, pain, age, indignity, and hideous lingering illness. All with a single conclusion. For you and for every one and every thing that you have chosen to care for. There's the true brotherhood. The true fellowship. And everyone is a member for life. You tell me that my brother is my salvation? My salvation? Well then damn him. Damn him in every shape and form and guise. Do I see myself in him? Yes, I do. And what I see sickens me. Do you understand me? Can you understand me?
Cormac McCarthy
By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.
Guy Gavriel Kay
A son for a son, heh. But that's a grandson...and he never was much use." --Walder Frey
George R.R. Martin
The Marquis sighed. "I thought it was just a legend," he said. "Like the alligators in the sewers of New York City."Old Bailey nodded, sagely: "What, the big white buggers? They're down there. I had a friend lost a head to one of them." A moment of silence. Old Naeiley handed the statue back to the Marquis. Then he raised his hand, and snapped it, like a crocodile hand, at the Carabas. "It was OK," gurned Old Bailey with a grin that was most terrible to behold. "He had another.
Neil Gaiman
Listen. You know what it's like when you're in a room with the light on and then suddenly the light goes out? I'll show you. It's like this."He turns out the light.BLACKOUT
Harold Pinter
A cold wind raced across the surrounding fields of wild grass, turning the land into a heaving dark-green ocean. It sighed up through the branches of cherry trees and rattled the thick leaves. Sometimes a cherry would break loose, tumble in the gale, fall and split, filling the night with its fragrance. The air was iron and loam and growth. He walked and tried to pull these things into his lungs, the silence and coolness of them.But someone was screaming, deep inside him. Someone was talking. ("Hunger")
Charles Beaumont
Bruce Wayne/Batman: A hero can be anyone, even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat on a young boy's shoulders to let him know that the world hadn't ended.
Christopher Nolan
I never know," Harry called to Hagrid over the noise of the cart, "What's the difference between a stalagmite and a stalactite?""Stalagmite's got an 'm' in it," said Hagrid.
J.K. Rowling
...and gentle happy and peaceful, tasting the mean goodness of their living like the last of their suppers in their mouths.
James Agee
There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them.
Nick Hornby
From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?
Ray Bradbury
A man can be short and dumpy and getting bald but if he has fire women will like him.
Mae West
It's not a big thing, but I guess it's true- big things are often just small things that are noticed.
Ned Vizzini
…in that moment, as he saw and smelled how irresistible its effect was and how with lightning speed it spread and made captives of the people all around him—in that moment his whole disgust for humankind rose up again within him and completely soured his triumph, so that he felt not only no joy, but not even the least bit of satisfaction. What he had always longed for—that other people should love him—became at the moment of his achievement unbearable, because he did not love them himself, he hated them. And suddenly he knew that he had never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred—in hating and in being hated.
Patrick Süskind
...Want to knowwhy my roses grow dead ona living vine? Prayer against civil war. Letus hate with a single heart. Don'tdrink the runoff. I always wanted a ruinso I bought a run-'er-down. Lovecontaminates
Robin Schiff
Why do the Gods make kings and queens if not to protect the ones who can't protect themselves?
George R.R. Martin
That's the funny thing about life. We're rarely aware of the bullets we dodge. The just-misses. The almost-never-happeneds. We spend so much time worrying about how the future is going to play out and not nearly enough time admiring the precious perfection of the present.
Lauren Miller
In that instant I regretted my indiscretion, and I have never really known if it was a form of compensation of because I needed to vomit up my pent-up anger that I did something unusual for me and told him about the ups and downs my family had experienced in the previous two months since my younger brother controversially came out a homosexual. I unleashed all the resentment I felt toward my parents for having punished the kid so cruelly. As I spoke, I noted that I had been so obtuse that until that exact moment, as I confided the details and feelings I hadn't even revealed to my wife to a person I barely knew, I had concentrated my resentment on my parents' attitude because in reality I had been ignoring the true origins of what had happened: the persistence of an institutionalized homophobia, of an extended ideological fundamentalism that rejected and repressed anything different and preyed on the most vulnerable ones, on those who don't adjust to the canons of orthodoxy. Then I understood that not just my parents but I myself had been the pawn of ancestral prejudices, of the surrounding pressures of the time, and, above all, the victim of fear, as much as or more (without a doubt, more) than William. I felt a certain rancor toward my brother, precisely because it was my brother who had been declared a faggot: I could understand and even accept that two professors may have gone the other way, but this wasn't the same as knowing - and having others know - that the one who went the other way was my own brother.pp. 175-176
Leonardo Padura
He lay in his stony crypt like his own corpse, hardly breathing, his heart hardly beating - and yet lived as intensively and dissolutely as ever a rake had lived in the wide world outside.
Patrick Süskind
I'm never getting a tattoo. My secrets are etched safely on the inside and I intend to keep them there.
Lisa O'Donnell
But you're like me,” he says. “An outsider. Different. A freak. We're both weird, which is why we get along.
Darren Shan
When the first living thing existed, I was there waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job will be finished. I'll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave.
Neil Gaiman
Lost Cactus is a cornucopia of sights, sounds and inhabitants completely foreign to a little squirrel like Sammy, but attempting to set him straight will only complicate matters.
John Hopkins
We accept the reality of the world in which we are presented.
Andrew Niccol
So why in the name of Merlin’s saggy left —”“Don’t talk to your mother like that.
J.K. Rowling
It's my letter," she began. "I cannot make it right.""Come in, come in," the Prince said gently. "Maybe we can help you." She sat down in the same chair as before. "All right, I'll close my eyes and listen; read to me."" 'Westley, my passion, my sweet, my only, my own. Come back, come back. I shall kill myself otherwise. Yours in torment, Buttercup.' " She looked at Humperdinck. "Well? Do you think I'm throwing myself at him?""It does seem a bit forward," the Prince admitted. "It doesn't leave him a great deal of room to maneuver.
William Goldman
So that's little Scorpious. Make sure you beat him in every test, Rosie. Thank god you've inherited your mother's brains.
J.K. Rowling
Every solution to every problem is simple. It's the distance between the two where the mystery lies.
Derek Landy
But he meant beauty in the sense of its organic connection to the material. And this is the connection that, for me, separates true stylists from decorators. The decorators are easy to recognize. That's why critics love them so.
Sidney Lumet
Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.
Neil Gaiman
Forgetting is the cost of living cheerfully.
Zoe Akins
Change not only was inevitable, but usually brought its own rewards.
Nicholas Sparks
I really admired Cesar Chavez and Gandhi, but my form of activism would have to be the written word, not the empty stomach. My parents had brought my family t the United States because of the fear of empty stomachs.
Josefina López
And tears came before he could stop them, boiling hot then instantly freezing on his face, and what was the point in wiping them off? Or pretending? He let them fall.
J.K. Rowling
Maybe sheetrocking wasn't one of Sully's favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you cared to look, and once you found this rhythm it'd get you through a morning. Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years - that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through. The clock moved if you let it.
Richard Russo
Sharks have everything a scientist dreams of. They're beautiful―God, how beautiful they are! They're like an impossibly perfect piece of machinery. They're as graceful as any bird. They're as mysterious as any animal on earth. No one knows for sure how long they live or what impulses―except for hunger―they respond to. There are more than two hundred and fifty species of shark, and everyone is different from every other one.
Peter Benchley
One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it - water stained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. It may be colder than the other gravestones, too, and the name on the stone is all too often impossible to read. If there is a statue on the grave it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichens as to look like fungus itself. If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals, that is the ghoul-gate. If the grave wants to make you be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate.
Neil Gaiman
Don't be so damned patronizing. Your performance so far has been a little less than dazzling.""I didn't mean no harm," I said and kissed her. "That a new dress?""Ah! Changing the subject, you coward.
Dashiell Hammett
I think that, even if we forget each other, we'll remember in our dreams.
Stephen King
Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.
Mae West
Fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically mediocre fantasy fiction is about people who have it and never lose it but simply wield it.
Stephen King
I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can't.
Stephen King
A world without pain, loss, betrayal, hate, death, loneliness? Impossible!
Darren Shan
Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.
Ray Bradbury
Life, he realize, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it's in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile.
Nicholas Sparks
All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories—if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.
Neil Gaiman
Today I found an old friend. –Ed Burns via Purple Violets
Edward Burns
So you shoot people," she said quietly. "You're a killer.""Me? How?""The papers and the police fixed it up nicely. But I don't believe everything I read.""Oh, you think I accounted for Geiger - or Brody-or both of them."She didn't say anything. "I didn't have to," I said. "I might have. I suppose, and got away with it. Neither of them would have hesitated to throw lead at.""That makes you a killer at heart, like all cops.""Oh, nuts.
Raymond Chandler
The trap had a ghastly perfection
Stephen King
An apple tree is just like a person. In order to thrive, it needs companionship that's similar to it in some ways, but quite different than others.
Jeffrey Stepakoff
For this was the round of love: fear which leads on desire, tenderness and fury, and that brutal anguish which triumphantly follows pleasure.
Françoise Sagan
That's basically the mantra of Herr Silverman's teaching - think for yourself and do what's right for you, but let others do the same.
Matthew Quick
Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.
François Truffaut
The best way of writing sex scenes is to do the first draft, orgasm, and then start editing. You can be objective post-orgasm.
Christos Tsiolkas
Alan invented all sorts of ways of expressing things so that only he and I understood. He used language as a place for us to hide.
Anthony Horowitz
We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law.
Ray Bradbury
But in that moment when my brother took the field, all that washed away, and everyone was proud... I looked up at my dad, and he was smiling. I looked at my mom, and she was smiling even though she was nervous about my brother getting hurt, which was strange because it was a VCR tape of an old game, and she knew he didn't get hurt.
Stephen Chbosky
Believe me, I'm no romantic, and while I've heard all about love at first sight, I've never believed in it, and I still don't. But even so, there was something there, something recognizably real, and I couldn't look away.
Nicholas Sparks
Consider the source...Don't be a fool by listening to a fool.
Sylvester Stallone
Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things.
Neil Gaiman