Some from four of my favorite movies:
Apocalypse Now
"Hey, man, you don't talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet-warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he'll... uh... well, you'll say "hello" to him, right? And he'll just walk right by you. He won't even notice you. And suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you in a corner, and he'll say, "do you know that 'if' is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you"... I mean I'm no, I can't... I'm a little man, I'm a little man, he's... he's a great man. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas... "
Kilgore: Smell that? You smell that?
Lance: What?
Kilgore: Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that.
[kneels]
Kilgore: I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like
[sniffing, pondering]
Kilgore: victory. Someday this war's gonna end...
Raising Arizona
"H.I., you're young and you got your health, what you want with a job? "
Glen: Say that reminds me, how'd you get that kid so darn fast? Me and Dot went in to adopt on account a' somethin' went wrong with my semen, and they said we had to wait five years for a healthy white baby. I said, "Healthy white baby? Five years? What else you got?" Said they got two Koreans and a negra born with his heart on the outside. It's a crazy world.
H.I.: Someone oughta sell tickets.
Glen: Sure, I'd buy one.
H.I.: Sometimes it's a hard world for small things.
Leonard Smalls: Name's Smalls. Leonard Smalls. My friends call me Lenny... only I ain't got no friends.
Nathan Arizona Sr.: Eight hundred leaf-tables and no chairs? You can't sell leaf-tables and no chairs. Chairs, you got a dinette set. No chairs, you got dick!
H.I.: Prison life is structured - more'n some people care for.
Prison Counsellor: Why do you say you feel "trapped" in a man's body?
"Trapped" Convict: Well, sometimes I get them menstrual cramps real hard.
H.I.: Edwina's insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.
Gale: All right, ya hayseeds, it's a stick-up. Everybody freeze. Everybody down on the ground.
Feisty Hayseed: Well, which is it, young feller? You want I should freeze or get down on the ground? Mean to say, if'n I freeze, I can't rightly drop. And if'n I drop, I'm a-gonna be in motion. You see...
Gale: Shut up!
Feisty Hayseed: Okay then.
Ear-Bending Cellmate: ...and when there was no meat, we ate fowl and when there was no fowl, we ate crawdad and when there was no crawdad to be found, we ate sand.
H.I.: You ate what?
Ear-Bending Cellmate: We ate sand.
[pause]
H.I.: You ate SAND?
Ear-Bending Cellmate: That's right!
Trainspotting
Mark "Rent-boy" Renton: I don't feel the sickness yet, but it's in the post. That's for sure. I'm in the junkie limbo at the moment. Too ill to sleep. Too tired to stay awake, but the sickness is on its way. Sweat, chills, nausea. Pain and craving. A need like nothing else I've ever known will soon take hold of me. It's on its way.
Mark "Rent-boy" Renton: I fantasize about a massive pristine convenience. Brilliant gold taps, virginal white marble, a seat carved from ebony, a cistern full of Chanel no.5, and a flunky handing me pieces of raw silk toilet roll. But under the circumstances I'll settle for anywhere.
Mark "Rent-boy" Renton: The downside of coming off junk was I knew I would need to mix with my friends again in a state of full consciousness. It was awful. They reminded me so much of myself, I could hardly bear to look at them.
Mark "Rent-boy" Renton: Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?
Mark "Rent-boy" Renton: People think it's all about misery and desperation and death and all that shit which is not to be ignored, but what they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise we wouldn't do it. After all, we're not fucking stupid. At least, we're not that fucking stupid.
Tommy: Very, absolutely fucking radge. "It's me, or Iggy Pop", she says.
Spud: So what're you gonna do?
Tommy: Well I paid for the tickets!
Mark "Rent-boy" Renton: It's SHITE being Scottish! We're the lowest of the low. The scum of the fucking Earth! The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization. Some hate the English. I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are COLONIZED by wankers. Can't even find a decent culture to be colonized BY. We're ruled by effete assholes. It's a SHITE state of affairs to be in, Tommy, and ALL the fresh air in the world won't make any fucking difference!
Mark "Rent-boy" Renton: This was to be my final hit, but let's be clear about this. There's final hits and final hits. What kind was this to be?
-This is the one that still gives me chills because of how true it is:
Mark "Rent-boy" Renton: It wasn't just the baby that died that day. Something inside Sick Boy was lost and never returned. It seemed that he had no theory with which to explain a moment like this... nor did I. Our only response was to keep on going and 'fuck everything'. pile misery upon misery, heap it up on a spoon and dissolve it with a drop of bile, then squirt it into a stinking, puerile vein and do it all over again. Keep on going, getting up, going out, robbing, stealing, fucking people over. Propelling ourselves with longing towards the day that it would all go wrong, because no matter how much you stash, or how much you steal you never have enough. No matter how often you go out and rob and fuck people over, you always need to get up and do it all over again.
Choke
Phil: A lot of people would say it's a bad idea, on your first day out of prison, to go right back to stalking the tranny hooker that knocked out five of your teeth. But that's how I roll.
Victor Mancini: And you're right-I'm pathetic. I have sex with strangers because I'm incapable of doing it with someone I actually like. I can't even ask anyone out on a date because if it doesn't end up in a high speed chase, I get bored. I've kept myself numb for so long that now I actually want to feel something and I can't because no matter where I go, no matter what I do, I always end up back here with you. I need to break up, Ma
Beth: Jesus was all about the idea that people are transformed.Not by being loved... but by the act of loving somebody,no matter how hard it is.
Victor Mancini: Sometimes you have to loose everything before the penny finally drops... or... whatever.So here's what I figured out.We're not evil sinners or perfect knock offs of god.We let the world tell us weather we're saints or sex addicts.Sane or insane.Heroes or victims.Weather we're good mothers,or loving sons.But we can decide for ourselves.As a certain wise fugitive once told me,sometimes its not important which way you jump,just that you jump.
Victor Mancini: As I reclaimed my personal booth at the cafe of diminished expectations, all I had to do was ask myself one simple question: What would Jesus NOT do?
-And one passage from the book, not in the movie:
Whatever lighting the photographer used was harsh and made bad shadows on the cement-block wall behind them. Just a painted wall in somebody's basement. The monkey looked tired and patchy with mange. The guy was in lousy shape, pale with rolls around his middle, but there he was, relaxed and bent over with his hands braced against his knees and his pouchy gut hanging down, his face looking back over his shoulder at the camera, smiling away.
"Beatific" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.
What the little boy first loved about pornography wasn't the sex part. It wasn't the pictures of beautiful people doinking each other, their heads thrown back, making those fake orgasm faces. Not at first. He'd found all those pictures on the Internet even before he knew what sex was. They had the Internet in every library. They had it at all the schools.
The way you can move from city to city and always find a Catholic church, the same Mass said everywhere, no matter what foster place the kid was sent, he could always find the Internet. The truth was, if Christ had laughed on the cross, or spat on the Romans, if he'd done anything more than just suffer, the kid would've liked church a lot more.
As it was, his favorite website was pretty much not sexy, at least not to him. You could just go there, and there would be about a dozen photographs of this one dumpy guy dressed as Tarzan with a goofy orangutan trained to poke what looked like roasted chestnuts up the guy's ass.
The guy's leopard-print loincloth is tossed to one side, the elastic waistband sunk into his tubby waist.
The monkey's crouched there, ready with the next chestnut.
There's nothing sexy about it. Still, the counter showed more than half a million people had been to see it.
"Pilgrimage" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.
I laughed for 20 minutes at that last line. BRILLIANT!!!
Anyone who reads through all of my quotes gets a chestnut up the ass