Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 56

Whenever he was in company he wanted to get away, and whenever he was alone he wanted company.
J.K. Rowling
Lord, grant us rest tonight, and if we must be wakeful, cheerful.
Robert Bolt
My compulsive thoughts aren't even thoughts, they're absolute certainties and obeying them isn't a choice.
Paul Rudnick
Like I'm on the verge of just blowing up. All the stress and pressure and anxiety just bubbling up.
Ned Vizzini
It felt like so many years' worth of anxiety and worry were trying to escape all at once—maybe like an emotional volcano, only my mom and dad, they didn't run away to save themselves but sprinted right into my lava.
Matthew Quick
The fear, though, is unassailable. The dark balls of dread pinball through my brain. This is what anxiety does to a brain, I know that. A barrage of intrusive, unwanted, and distressing thoughts that the person thinking them can't turn them off no matter how hard they try...
Lauren Miller
Did you have one of those days today, like a nail in the foot? Did the pterodactyl corpse dropped by the ghost of your mother from the spectral Hindenburg forever circling the Earth come smashing through the lid of your glass coffin? Did the New York strip steak you attacked at dinner suddenly show a mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth, and did it snap off the end of your fork, the last solid-gold fork from the set Anastasia pressed into your hands as they took her away to be shot? Is the slab under your apartment building moaning that it cannot stand the weight on its back a moment longer, and is the building stretching and creaking? Did a good friend betray you today, or did that good friend merely keep silent and fail to come to your aid? Are you holding the razor at your throat this very instant? Take heart, comfort is at hand. This is the hour that stretches. Djan karet. We are the cavalry. We're here. Put away the pills. We'll get you through this bloody night. Next time, it'll be your turn to help us."Eidolons" (1988)
Harlan Ellison
He might have been encased in a thick glass bubble, so separate did he feel from his three dining companions. It was a sensation with which he was only too familiar, that of walking in a giant sphere of worry, enclosed by it, watching his own terrors roll by, obscuring the outside world.
J.K. Rowling
He felt like normal. Filled with anxiety, dread, sure. But even that wasn't unusual...
John Ajvide Lindqvist
Love is a luxury. It's something that people are allowed to indulge in when they're not simply trying to survive and keep other people alive.
Julianna Baggott
Everybody’s gotta have somebody to step on. Makes ’em feel important.
Juliann Garey
Survival of the generic.
Siobhan Vivian
You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It's all about survival; it's all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in, in the hope that you might be lucky, and the knife has actually been staunching the blood. You want to know the conventional medical wisdom? The conventional medical wisdom is that you keep the knife in. Really.
Nick Hornby
You try to tell yourself that you've been lucky, most incredibly lucky, and usually that works because it's true. Sometimes it doesn't work, that's all. Then you cry.
Stephen King
Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing else beyond their own survival?
Ian McEwan
Unlike its human counterparts, an army of zombies is completely independent of support. It will not require food,ammunition, or medical attention. It will not succumb to panic, desertion, or out-and-out mutiny. Like the virus that gave it life, this undead force will continue to grow, spreading across the body of this planet until there is nothing left to devour. Where would you go? What would you do?
Max Brooks
There was a freshness about her that the surrounding harsh landscape had failed to eliminate
Alan Dean Foster
The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
John Banville
The foraging for food and water, the struggle for life in a world without masters, housed in a body that man had made dependent on himself.
Richard Matheson
And Adam ruled, for he was the King. Until the day his will to be King deserted him. Then he died, food for a stronger. And the strongest was always the King, not by strength alone, but King by cunning and luck and strength together. Among the rats.
James Clavell
You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame. Yeah, see, they die of shame. 'What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?' And so they sit there and they... die. Because they didn't do the one thing that would save their lives. Thinking.
David Mamet
The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.
Cormac McCarthy
We're all put to the test... but it never comes in the form or at the point we would prefer, does it?
David Mamet
The highest distinction is service to others.
Max Brooks
A sworn sworn owes his liege our service and obedience, but this is madness.
George R.R. Martin
The ego camouflages itself like a fox born and raised in a hen house. Its only worry is that you fail to notice its presence every so often and start acting without fear
Dean Cavanagh
Such an ego simply forbade certain lines of thought.
Stephen King
Huxley: "Tell me something Bryce, do you know the difference between a Jersey, a Guernsey, a Holstein, and an Ayershire?"Bryce: "No."Huxley: "Seabags Brown does."Bryce: "I don't see what that has to do..."Huxley: "What do you know about Gaelic history?"Bryce: "Not much."Huxley: "Then why don't you sit down one day with Gunner McQuade. He is an expert. Speaks the language, too."Bryce: "I don't..."Huxley: " What do you know about astronomy?"Bryce: "A little."Huxley: "Discuss it with Wellman, he held a fellowship." Bryce: "This is most puzzling."Huxley: "What about Homer, ever read Homer?"Bryce: "Of course I've read Homer."Huxley: "In the original Greek?"Bryce: "No"Huxley: "Then chat with Pfc. Hodgkiss. Loves to read the ancient Greek."Bryce: "Would you kindly get to the point?"Huxley: "The point is this, Bryce. What makes you think you are so goddam superior? Who gave you the bright idea that you had a corner on the world's knowledge? There are privates in this battalion who can piss more brains down a slit trench then you'll ever have. You're the most pretentious, egotistical individual I've ever encountered. Your superiority complex reeks. I've seen the way you treat men, like a big strutting peacock. Why, you've had them do everything but wipe your ass.
Leon Uris
Remember at the junior picnic, when someone whipped that dog at Jennifer's head? And Jennifer was laughing, like it was funny? Ted never copped to it, but I know he did it. I saw him. A-hole.'Rachel shakes her head in disgust. 'She probably deals with that kind of crap every day...''That's it. I'm going to ask Jennifer if she wants to sit with us today... I don't like those little turds thinking they can make fun of her because she's on the list. Don't they have any respect for the fact that she's a senior? If she's with us, they wouldn't dare say anything.
Siobhan Vivian
We’re all going to keep fighting, Harry. You know that?
J.K. Rowling
My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that's heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.
George R.R. Martin
What's the bravest thing you ever did?He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.
Cormac McCarthy
I don't really like driving in the snow. There's something about the motion of the falling snowflakes that hurts my eyes, throws my sense of balance all to hell. It's like tumbling into a field of stars.
Neil Gaiman
Orion is above the horizon now, and near it Jupiter, brighter than it will ever be ... But i expect you can see it too. Some of our stars are the same.
Thomas Harris
Few of us have seen the stars as folk saw them then - our cities and towns cast too much light into the night - but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree.
Neil Gaiman
And then, to the sound of death, the sound of the jets cutting the sky in two black pieces beyond the horizon, he would lie in the loft, hidden and safe, watching those strange new stars over the rim of the earth, fleeing from the soft color of dawn.
Ray Bradbury
This probably isn’t something you’re supposed to say at a moment like this, but I think the moon is seriously overrated.” A moment like what? I bite my cheeks, taming the grin that threatens to take over my face.“And the stars?” I ask, once the smile is under control.“Wildly underrated,” he declares with a grin. He looks up again. “The sky is a storybook,” he says then. “Every constellation’s like its own fairy tale.
Lauren Miller
The stars were going out now, one by one, dropping like pennies behind the television aerials and the skylights and the washing strung between the chimneys. The sky was still dark - a sated, navy-blue woman - but the grass was jittery with the expectation of dawn.
Peter S Beagle
And all I could see would be stars. And stars are the places where the molecules that life is made of were constructed billions of years ago. For example, all the iron in your blood which stops you from being anemic was made in a star.
Mark Haddon
You never get tired of looking at the stars
Warren Ellis
Humanity could be clutching the frail barque of an outmoded world view while the wind of the mind is swaying the stars into very real craft, and out of them is coming… a faint call for help from a lady in a flowered dress.
Whitley Strieber
You are both stars, don’t forget.When the stars exploded billions ofyears ago, they formed everythingthat is this world. The moon, thetrees, everything we know isstardust. So don’t forget. Youare stardust.- ROSE PEDDLER
Richard Linklater
He felt that the stars had been pulverized by the sound of the black jets and that in the morning the earth would be covered with their dust like a strange snow.
Ray Bradbury
I’m evolving, is the thing; I’m a god becoming a constellation.’‘The constellations are mostly demigods,’ I point out. ‘And they didn’t get to be constellations until after they died.’He laughs at that, and says, ‘Death is a small sacrifice to become immortal.
Neal Shusterman
Looking up at that starry sky gave him the creeps: it was too big, too black. It was all too possible to imagine it turning blood-red, all too possible to imagine a Face forming in lines of fire.
Stephen King
I think I would make a very good astronaut.To be a good astronaut you have to be intelligent and I’m intelligent. You also have to understand how machines work and I’m good at understanding how machines work. You also have to be someone who would like being on their own in a tiny spacecraft thousands and thousands of miles away from the surface of the earth and not panic or get claustrophobia or homesick or insane. And I really like little spaces, so long as there is no one else in them with me. Sometimes when I want to be on my own I get into the airing cupboard outside the bathroom and slide in beside the boiler and pull the door closed behind me and sit there and think for hours and it makes me feel very calm.So I would have to be an astronaut on my own, or have my own part of the space craft which no one else could come into.And also there are no yellow things or brown things in a space craft, so that would be okay too.And I would have to talk to other people from Mission Control, but we would do that through a radio linkup and a TV monitor, so they wouldn’t be like real people who are strangers, but it would be like playing a computer game.Also I wouldn’t be homesick at all because I’d be surrounded by things I like, which are machines and computers and outer space. And I would be able to look out of a little window in the spacecraft and know that there was no one near me for thousands and thousands of miles, which is what I sometimes pretend at night in the summer when I go and lie on the lawn and look up at the sky and I put my hands round the sides of my face so that I can’t see the fence and the chimney and the washing line and I can pretend I’m in space.And all I could see would be stars. And stars are the places where molecules that life is made of were constructed billions of years ago. For example, all the iron in your blood which keeps you from being anemic was made in a star.And I would like it if I could take Toby with me into space, and that might be allowed because they sometimes do take animals into space for experiments, so if I could think of a good experiment you could do with a rat that didn’t hurt the rat, I could make them let me take Toby.But if they didn’t let me I would still go because it would be a Dream Come True.
Mark Haddon
There are more stars than there are people. Billions, Alan had said, and millions of them might have planets just as good as ours. Ever since I can remember, I’ve felt too big. But now I felt small. Too small. Too small to count. Every star is massive, but there are so many of them. How could anyone care about one star when there were so many spare? And what if stars were small? What if all the stars were just pixels? And earth was less than a pixel? What does that make us? And what does that make me? Not even dust. I felt tiny. For the first time in my life I felt too small.
Frank Cottrell Boyce
It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.
Cormac McCarthy
He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.
Cormac McCarthy
Putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun.
Ray Bradbury
Why would the stars want to look down on such as me?
George R.R. Martin
I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend...I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend...
Neil Gaiman
A fearless heart is free of desire, a kind heart finds paradise everywhere.
Alan Yuen
There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.
Raymond Chandler
He gave me a small, secretive smile, a smile that said he knew many things but couldn’t share them all at once.
David Benioff
... the sort of smiles used at weddings, turned on very carefully to half pressure to prevent them wearing out.
R.C. Sherriff
My smile is my servant, he should come at my command.
George R.R. Martin
Loki was trying to look serious, but even so, he was smiling at the corners of his mouth. It was not a reassuring smile.
Neil Gaiman
... it’s a nice day’s work when you make a lot of people smile.
Gillian Flynn
Show Dr. Princi your teeth. That's right, let's see 'em all. Christ, Sparks, is that your tongue or are you swallowing a squirrel? Keep moving -
Thomas Harris