Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 26

What we call patriotism, in other words, is a calculable force which, released by a predictable situation, will animate man in a manner no different from other territorial species.
Robert Ardrey
John: I'm experiencing an odd sensation. I think it might be patriotism.Spitfire: Steady. Too much of that can damage your health.
Paul Cornell
Moreover, there was what Amy called “the cocksuckers’ contingent of the country”—what Danny knew as the dumber-than-dog-shit element, those bully patriots—and they were too set in their ways or too poorly educated (or both) to see beyond the ceaseless flag-waving and nationalistic bluster.
John Irving
Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail, and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but refuse. They cling to the realm, or love, or the gods…illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is. But they’ll never know this. Not until it’s too late.
David Benioff
Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish: The realm. Do you know what the realm is? It's the thousand blades of Aegon's enemies, a story we agree to tell each other over and over, until we forget that it's a lie.Lord Varys: But what do we have left, once we abandon the lie? Chaos? A gaping pit waiting to swallow us all.Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish: Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some, are given a chance to climb. They refuse, they cling to the realm or the gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.
George R.R. Martin
Too much of a good thing can be wonderful!
Mae West
It's funny, but have you ever noticed that the more special something is, the more people seem to take it for granted? It's like they think it won't ever change. Just like this house here. All it ever needed was a little attention, and it would never have ended up like this in the first place.
Nicholas Sparks
A man is nothing more than the things he does to get what he wants.
Hal Ackerman
He's a conundrum- and there's still a piece missing from the puzzle." Whatever that piece was, there was a part of me telling me not to get involved- that it was too much to handle. That you shouldn't go out on a limb unless you're absolutely sure the limb can support your weight.
Neal Shusterman
What we did, what every president since Washington has done, was provide a measured, appropriate response, in direct relation to a realistic threat assessment.
Max Brooks
For the first time, I understand that, as much as one might desire change, one has to be willing to take a risk, to free-fall, to fail, and that you've got to let go of the past.
A.M. Homes
Behind all the surface composure, there seemed to be a great darkness: an urge to test himself, to take risks, to haunt the edges of things.
Paul Auster
Your best authorial self is always one about to ruin the story.
Chuck Wendig
Sirius looked out of the fire at Harry, a crease between his sunken eyes. “You’re less like your father than I thought,” he said finally, a definite coolness in his voice. “The risk would’ve been what made it fun for James.”“Look —”“Well, I’d better get going . . . I’ll write to tell you a time I can make it back into the fire, then, shall I? If you can stand to risk
J.K. Rowling
Look, I can appreciate this. I was young too, I felt just like you. Hated authority, hated all my bosses, thought they were full of shit. Look, it's like they say, if you're not a rebel by the age of 20, you got no heart, but if you haven't turned establishment by 30, you've got no brains. Because there are no story-book romances, no fairy-tale endings. So before you run out and change the world, ask yourself, "What do you really want?
George Huang
Before you are much older...you will have policemen here to stay. A magistrate will be next. Then perhaps even a jail. And the counterparts of those things are hunger and want, and misery and idleness. The night is coming. Watch and pray.
Richard Llewellyn
What man wants does not matter.
George R.R. Martin
To get what he wanted, a man had to give other people what they wanted.
Dashiell Hammett
That's how it is with want. As long as you lack something you yearn for it without cease. if only I could have that one thing, you tell yourself, all my problems would be solved. But once you get it, once the object of your desires is thrust into your hands, it begins to lose its charm. Other wants assert themselves, other desires make themselves felt, and bit by bit you discover that you're right back where you started.
Paul Auster
I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don't want.
Stanley Kubrick
Almost always, things are exactly as they appear. People are continually looking at the painful or boring parts of life with the half-hidden expectation that there is more going on beneath the surface, some deeper meaning that will eventually be unveiled; we're waiting for the saving grace, the shocking reveal. But almost always things just are what they are, almost always there's no glittering one hidden under the dirt.
Ben H. Winters
So let's say you marry this girl. All right, you can still be a great man. Look at all the great men who had wives. Go ahead, be a great man, don't let me stop you. Only first you should stop by the grocer and pick up something for the dog. Also for the baby, soft, because he's getting his teeth. To do this, you have to have a job five days a week, you can be a great man on week ends.
Peter S Beagle
There came a time when you realised that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.
Stephen King
Maybe that's what love is-counting the bandages until someone says, 'Enough'.
Dennis Lehane
It happens to everyone as they grow up. You find out who you are and what you want, and then you realize that people you've known forever don't see things the way you do. So you keep the wonderful memories, but find yourself moving on.
Nicholas Sparks
And what were the rules at St. Cloud's? What were Larch's rules? Which rules did Dr. Larch observe, which ones did he break, or replace--and with what confidence?
John Irving
Somewhere on the Earth tonight, my Tylla, there is a Man with a Lever, which, when he pulls it, Will Save The World. The man is now unemployed. His switch gathers dust. He himself plays pinochle.
Ray Bradbury
Let the war turn off the families. Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.
Ray Bradbury
Without the library, you have no civilization.
Ray Bradbury
Well, luck is for fools. It's all they have to hope for, poor devils.
Stephen King
Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.
Ray Bradbury
It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.
Neil Gaiman
Luck is a woman. She's drawn to those that least deserve her.
Joe Abercrombie
It had taken skill, tact, an ability to choose friends well, and a great deal of luck... Luck was always part of it, one way or another
Guy Gavriel Kay
There was no such thing as luck. Luck was a word idiots used to explain the consequences of their own rashness, and selfishness, and stupidity. More often than not bad luck meant bad plans.
Joe Abercrombie
Luck works only when you work. Even when it comes to lottery, only those who make the effort to go to a lottery store and buy one, stand a chance to win a lottery".
Pradeep Sarkkar
We are all a great deal luckier that we realize, we usually get what we want - or near enough.
Roald Dahl
Life brings only so much luck which when used up leaves you without a safety net.
Michael R. French
Hazel: Listen babe you have to search for your luck it's nice if it just falls in your lap but I look for my lucky pennies. ... Maggie: What do you do with all your pennies Hazel: I give them away. It's good to spread your luck around and it always comes back to you.
Fannie Flagg
You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
Cormac McCarthy
One of life's great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred pound Coke machine, one need worry about little else.
Stephen King
This is the problem about thinking about something else to take your mind off something. It works for a little while, but in the end you always come back to the thing you were trying not to think about, only now whatever it was is worse.
Marcelo Figueras
Worry was my mother's mechanic, her mechanism for engaging with the machinery of living. Worry was an anchor for her, a hook, something to clutch on to in the world. Worry was a box to live inside of, worry a mechanism for evading the present, for re-creating the past, for dealing with the future.
Charles Yu
It would be so nice to be wanted by someone with the courage to get his hat or stay as he damn pleased, and who gave her credit for the same. Someone who didn't worry about her.
Thomas Harris
We know we are all tarnished, so we doubt everyone else too. It is sad situation, where we need a leader but cannot really trust anyone.
Chetan Bhagat
Time Is Speeding Up In Relation To Corruption. Hold On Tight.
Dean Cavanagh
The depths cleared again. Something moved in them that was not a board. It rose slowly, with an infinitely careless languor, a long dark twisted something that rolled lazily in the water as it rose. It broke surface casually, lightly, without haste. I saw wool, sodden and black, a leather jerkin blacker than ink, a pair of slacks. I saw shoes and something that bulged nastily between the shoes and the cuffs of the slacks. I saw a wave of dark blond hair straighten out in the water and hold still for a brief instant as if with a calculated effect, and then swirl into a tangle again.
Raymond Chandler
Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
John Irving
Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college, and the play began in natural light. But as it developed, and as it became time for Ariel to say his farewell to the world of The Tempest, the evening had started to close in and there was some artificial lighting coming on. And as Ariel uttered his last speech, he turned and he ran across the grass, and he got to the edge of the lake and he just kept running across the top of the water — the producer having thoughtfully provided a kind of walkway an inch beneath the water. And you could see and you could hear the plish, plash as he ran away from you across the top of the lake, until the gloom enveloped him and he disappeared from your view.And as he did so, from the further shore, a firework rocket was ignited, and it went whoosh into the air, and high up there it burst into lots of sparks, and all the sparks went out, and he had gone.When you look up the stage directions, it says, ‘Exit Ariel.
Tom Stoppard
It is gaol that finally reveals to me the beauty of Shakespeare, the spirit in his words, the jaw-dropping audacity of his language.
Christos Tsiolkas
To be and not to be, that is the quantum question
Dean Cavanagh
What sad, short lives humans live! Each life a short pamphlet written by an idiot! Tut-tut, and all that.
Stephen King
Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.
Ray Bradbury
I believe that we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing.
Cormac McCarthy
A line from The Picture of Dorian Gray kept running through my head- a line which, I thought, might have been written by the Devil himself:"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.
Syrie James
But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.
Mark Haddon
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
I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.
Cormac McCarthy
After Jacob had worked for Laban for seven years, do you know what happened? Laban fooled him and gave him his ugly daughter Leah. So to marry Rachel, Jacob was forced to work another seven years.So, you see, children, the Bible clearly teaches us you can never trust an employer.
Joseph Stein
Stalin goes to visit one of the collectives outside of Moscow,” began Kolya in his joke-telling voice. “Wants to see how they’re getting on with the latest Five-Year Plan. ‘Tell me, comrade,’ he asks one farmer. ‘How did the potatoes do this year?’ ‘Very well, Comrade Stalin. If we piled them up, they would reach God.’ ‘But God does not exist, Comrade Farmer.’ ‘Nor do the potatoes, Comrade Stalin.
David Benioff