Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 115

People need foundation myths, some imprint of year zero, a bolt that secures the scaffolding that in turn holds fast the entire architecture of reality, of time: memory-chambers and oblivion-cellars, walls between eras, hallways that sweep us on towards the end-days and the coming whatever-it-is. We see things shroudedly, as through a veil, an over-pixellated screen. When the shapeless plasma takes on form and resolution, like a fish approaching us through murky waters or an image looming into view from noxious liquid in a darkroom, when it begins to coalesce into a figure that's discernible, if ciphered, we can say: This is it, stirring, looming even if it isn't really, if it's all just ink-blots.
Tom McCarthy
Reality is symbolic. We build it using only the 26 symbols of the alphabet alongside images that speak to us on a linguistic level built from the 26 symbols of the alphabet.
Dean Cavanagh
the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.
Gillian Flynn
Now that he wanted to feel like he was having a bad dream, he wasn't. He was having a bad reality, and that was something from which you could not wake.
Stephen King
Not to be rich, but to have money; to have money like a wall to put your back to, and then face the world.
Mario Puzo
By any measure, we live in an extraordinary and extreme time. Language can no longer describe the world in which we live. With antique ideas and old formulas, we continue to describe a world that is no longer present. In this loss of language, the word gives way to the image as the 'language' of exchange, in which critical thought disappears to a diabolic regime of conformity - the hyper-real, the omnipresent image. Language, real place gives way to numerical code, the real virtual; metaphor to metamorphosis; body to disembodiment; natural to supernatural; many to one. Mystery disappears, replaced by the illusion of certainty in technological perfection.
Godfrey Reggio
Different creatures have different eyes. Human eyes (unlike, say, a cat's eyes, or an octopus's) are only made to see one version of reality at a time.
Neil Gaiman
We imagine all these postapocalyptic, class-stratified, new-world-order techno-futures. But actually the real world, the world we live in, this is the dystopia.
Elan Mastai
The memories: they are the reality.
Stephen King
You do care. You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.
J.K. Rowling
We see what we want to see, what we expect to see, instead of what's really there. I don't think we do it on purpose, most of the time. We just get kind of stuck. We start thinking that the way things are is the way they'll always be. But that's not true. It can't be true. Because the world is never still.
Lauren Miller
What happens when you die? Well, we're not completely sure. But the evidence seems to suggest that nothing happens. You're just dead, your brain stops working, and then you're not around to ask annoying questions anymore. Those stories you heard? About going to a wonderful place called 'heaven' where there is no pain or death and you live forever in a state of perpetual happiness? Also total bullshit. Just like all that God stuff. There's no evidence of a heaven and there never was. We made that up too. Wishful thinking. So now you have to live the rest of your life knowing you're going to die someday and disappear forever.Sorry.
Ernest Cline
Much later that night, I thought the door opened and a man came into the bedroom. He was leaning on a stick. He didn't say anything but he stood there, looking sadly at Andreas and me, and as a shaft of moonlight came slanting in through the window, I recognized Atticus Pünd. I was asleep, of course, and dreaming, but I remember wondering how he had managed to enter my world before the thought occurred to me that maybe it was I who had entered his.
Anthony Horowitz
We accept the reality of the world in which we are presented.
Andrew Niccol
We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.
Andrew Niccol
The truth is, there are no alternate realities. At least not the way Penny describes them. Maybe an infinite multiverse is born from every action, whether it’s two atoms colliding or two people. Maybe reality is constantly fluctuating around us, but our senses aren’t equipped to detect those quantum variations. Maybe that’s what our senses are, an ungainly organic sieve through which the chaos of existence is filtered into something manageable enough that you can get out of bed in the morning . Maybe the totality of what we perceive with our senses is as clumsy a portrait of reality as a child’s chalk drawing on a sidewalk compared to the face of the woman you’re already falling in love with lying next to you in a mess of sheets and blankets, her lips still pursed as they pull away from your mouth.
Elan Mastai
If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through that shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?
Stephen King
You can love someone and not like spending time with them.
Will Fetters
What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.
Cormac McCarthy
Mostly you are what they think you are.
Neil Gaiman
Harsh justice is still justice.
George R.R. Martin
For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying . . . but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.
Stephen King
All he ever knew of her was who he saw every day. All I am is who I am every day. All anyone is to anyone is a series of days.
Charles Yu
People talk about escapism as if it's a bad thing... Once you've escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills, weapons, knowledge you didn't have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality.
Neil Gaiman
That's the thing about being the product of happily marries parents, You grow up thinking the fairy tale is real, and more than that, you think you're entitled to live it. So far, though, it wasn't working out as planned.
Nicholas Sparks
A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until--"My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience... "Look, look!" recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.
Tom Stoppard
You can only get outside yourself by looking inside.
Tonya Hurley
He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.
Cormac McCarthy
As sure as water's wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end.
Neil Gaiman
You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.
Neil Gaiman
The thing about real life is, when you do something stupid, it normally costs you. In books the heroes can make as many mistakes as they like. It doesn't matter what they do, because everything works out in the end. They'll beat the bad guys and put things right and everything ends up cool.In real life, vacuum cleaners kill spiders. If you cross a busy road without looking, you get whacked by a car. If you fall from a tree, you break some bones. Real life's nasty. It's cruel. It doesn't care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen. People die. Fights are lost. Evil often wins. I just wanted to make that clear before I begun.
Darren Shan
There either is or is not, that’s the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it’s red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on the day. I’m not going to tell you the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.— Great Expectations (1998) directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Mitch Glazer
When the vision fills your brain and passion hits your gut, the need to write it down cannot be stifled. (Marti Melville)
Marti Melville
When the vision fill yours mind and passio hits your gut, the need to write it down cannot be stifled.
Marti Melville
...but unlike me, she has a hard time saying such things. She loved me with a passion, but I felt it in her expressions, in her touch, in the tender brush of her lips. And, when I needed it most, she loved me with the written word as well.
Nicholas Sparks
What you love, you must love all the harder because someday it will be gone.
Stephen King
A man is always right to pursue the thing he loves.No matter even if it kills him?I think so. Yes. No matter what.
Cormac McCarthy
Yeah! "I love you" is subject to the law of diminishing returns; like one or two other critical weekly elements of a relationship, it loses a bit of thrilling value every time you get it out.'... That's what happens with "I love you", that same phrase that you once shouted Hollywood or Heathcliff-like in the lashing raining, now- now you are saying it dumbly at the end of every phone conversation, a follow-on from," I'll be back for dinner." Once it came out spontaneous rush, it forced itself out; now it's reflex.
David Baddiel
Don't let this consume you. Try not to blame me. Don't live in hate. Or grief. Just live.
Jackson Lanzing
I worked hard as [fuck] to get here.
Jackson Lanzing
Passion - eventually it cools.
Francesca Marciano
It can be coins or sports or politics or horses or music or faith... the saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all. Passion and satisfaction go hand in hand, and without them, any happiness is only temporary, because there's nothing to make it last.
Nicholas Sparks
Oh I believe in loving cats and dogs and children and parents – sometimes – but I don’t believe in romantic love. Of course, there’s the momentary rush of hormones and chemicals that encourages us to mate, but it’s biology – it’s no more inherently mystical than the nicotine in that cigarette you’re smoking
Amy Jenkins
Let us be separated by wars and pestilence, death, madness but not by the passing of time.
Mario Puzo
Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves; just as in the experiment, we need oxygen and a candle to help. In this case, the oxygen, for example, would come from the breath of the person you love; the candle could be any kind of food, music, caress, word, or sound that engenders the explosion that lights one of the matches.
Laura Esquivel
Passion. It lies in all of us. Sleeping... waiting... and though unwanted, unbidden, it will stir... open its jaws and howl. It speaks to us... guides us. Passion rules us all. And we obey. What other choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love... the clarity of hatred... the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and dank. Without passion, we'd be truly dead.
Joss Whedon
I felt afraid. No one would know that, not Mother and not Mike. I’d keep the fear pushed down inside of me, and no one would know it was there. “I’m awfully happy,” I wrote. I was. Awfully happy and awfully in love, and tomorrow I was marrying Mike.
Benedict Freedman
ANDREW: But do you think there’s a line? You know, where you discourage the next Charlie Parker from becoming Charlie Parker?FLETCHER: No. Because the next Charlie Parker would never be discouraged.
Damien Chazelle
The beach was empty and dark but she couldn't hear her fear over the call of the surf.
Lori Lansens
Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?”“That is the only time a man can be brave,
George R.R. Martin
I know that you are preparing to fight." There were screams amongst the students, some of whom clutched each other, looking around in terror for the source of the sound. "Your efforts are futile. You cannot fight me. I do not want to kill you. I have great respect for the teachers of Hogwarts. I do not want to spill magical blood."There was silence in the Hall now, the kind of silence that presses against the eardrums, that seems too huge to be contained by walls."Give me Harry Potter," said Voldemort's voice, "and they shall not be harmed.Give me Harry Potter and I shall leave the school untouched. Give me Harry Potter and you will be rewarded."You have until midnight."The silence swallowed them all again. Every head turned, every eye in the place seemed to have found Harry, to hold him forever in the glare of thousands of invisible beams. Then a figure rose from the Slytherin table and he recognized Pansy Parkinson as she raised a shaking arm and screamed, "But he's there! Potter's there. Someone grab him!"Before Harry could speak, there was a massive movement. The Gryffindors in front of him had risen and stood facing, not Harry, but the Slytherins. Then the Hufflepuffs stood, and almost at the same moment, the Ravenclaws, all of them with their backs to Harry, all of them looking toward Pansy instead, and Harry, awestruck and overwhelmed, saw wands emerging everywhere, pulled from beneath cloaks and from under sleeves."Thank you, Miss Parkinson." said Professor McGonagall in a clipped voice."You will leave the Hall first with Mr. Filch. If the rest of your House could follow.
J.K. Rowling
Come on!' he muttered, staring about. 'Where are you? Dad, come on--" But no one came. Harry raised his head to look at the circle of dementors across the lake. One of them was lowering its hood. It was time for the rescuer to appear--but no one was coming to help this time-- And then it hit him--he understood. He hadn't seen his father--he had seen himself--... 'It was stupid, thinking it was him,' he (Harry) muttered. 'I mean, I knew he was dead.' 'You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him. How else could you produce that particular Patronus? Prongs rode again last night.'... 'You know, Harry, in a way, you did see your father last night...You found him inside yourself.' And Dumbledore left the office, leaving Harry to his very confused thoughts.
J.K. Rowling
Katherine Mary, w'er going to know each other very well, for many years, I hope. You'll see, you'll come to understand. These big things, these terrible things, are not the important ones. If they were, how could one go on living? No, it is the small, little things that make up a day, that bring fullness and happiness to your life. Your Sergeant coming home, a good dinner, your little Mary laughing, the smell of the woods - oh, so many things, you know them yourself
Benedict Freedman
Running from horrors doesn't help. The only way to deal with them is to meet them head-on.
Peter David
I had been to Jeddah on my previous trip, so I knew it well enough. There was only one thing to recommend it: say, you wanted to commit suicide and couldn’t quite find the courage, two days in Jeddah would do the trick.
Terry Hayes
Only a bet on the impossible makes sense. It is an act of faith and courage requiring an irrational leap over reason. A man wins simply by making such a bet.
William Kennedy
This, he knew, was courage, the truest, ultimate courage, because there was no one here to sympathize or praise him for it. What he felt was felt without the hope of commendation.
Richard Matheson
[L]ife is more than just steering a course around pain.
Stephen King
WHAT I'M TELLING YOU IS, IF YOU WANT TO DO THINGS YOUR OWN WAY, YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO MAKE A DECISION - YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO FIND A LITTLE COURAGE.
John Irving
Whatever strength, courage... madness keeps us going, we find it, in times like these. You have it, soldier. It's what kept you alive all this time.
Danny Strong