Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 74

A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?" Pointless, really..."Do the stars gaze back?" Now, that's a question.
Neil Gaiman
If you made a better rat than a human, it’s not much to boast about, Peter.
J.K. Rowling
Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at the stars because we are human?
Neil Gaiman
When those who name dead people have gone, there just remains the calmness of foreign cemeteries, in which nothing appears familiar and nothing frightens you.
Ray Loriga
Dreams are composed of many things, my son. Of images and hopes, of fears and memories. Memories of the past, and memories of the future...
Neil Gaiman
You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for... and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you.
Stephen King
Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.
Stephen King
And the air--I don't know how to describe it exactly--it had that strange cool spring feeling in it, that feeling as if you remember something wonderful but you're not quite sure what it is.
Andrew Klavan
It is very strange to think back like this, although come to think of it, there is no fence or hedge round Time that has gone. You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough.
Richard Llewellyn
He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality,known or not.
Cormac McCarthy
The way those old memories kept bubbling to the surface in the present tense was disturbing. It was as if the past had never died; as if on some level of time's great tower, everything was still happening.
Stephen King
There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.
Ray Bradbury
Adán fell asleep to these stories and slept like the dead until the sun struck him in the eyes and the whole long, wonderful summer day started again with the smell of fresh tortillas, manchaca, chorizo, and fat, sweet oranges.
Don Winslow
Regrets serve their purpose. You'll see.
Lori Lansens
Some memories were all right, but others were dangerous.
Stephen King
She tasted the day he lost his first job. She tasted the morning he had awakened, still drunk, in his car, in the middle of a cornfield, and, terrified, had sworn off the bottle for ever. She knee his real name. She remembered the name that had once been tattooed on his arm and knew why it could be there no longer. She tasted the color of his eyes from the inside, and shivered at the nightmare he had in which he was forced to carry spiny fish in his mouth, and from which he woke, choking, night after night. She savored the hungers in food and fiction, and discovered a dark sky when he was a small boy and he had stared up at the stars and wondered at their vastness and immensity, that even he had forgotten.
Neil Gaiman
Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything.
Neil Gaiman
No, honey. Maybe you can put the things from the Overlook away in lockboxes, but not memories. Never those. They’re the real ghosts.
Stephen King
All my memories are poisoned.
George R.R. Martin
The day might come when I had nothing but memories, and the choice of whether to indulge my romantic side and wallow in them, or my cynical side and reflect on the reliability.
Graeme Simsion
What a host of little incidents, all deep-buried in the past -- problems that had once been urgent, arguments that had once been keen, anecdotes that were funny only because one remembered the fun. Did any emotion really matter when the last trace of it had vanished from human memory; and if that were so, what a crowd of emotions clung to him as to their last home before annihilation? He must be kind to them, must treasure them in his mind before their long sleep.
James Hilton
Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. 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
You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.
John Banville
A good fragrance is really a powerful cocktail of memories and emotion.
Jeffrey Stepakoff
From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions - fear, desire, anger - serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost . . . .
David Nicholls
Inquisitor Lorsen's thin lip curled. "There is truly nothing in you of what separates man from animal, is there? You are bereft of conscience. An utter absence of morality. You have no principle beyond the selfish."Cosca's face hardened as he leaned forwards. "Perhaps when you have faced as many disappointments and suffered as many betrayals as I, you will see it - there is no principle beyond the selfish, Inquisitor, and men are animals. Conscience is a burden we choose to bear. Morality is the lie we tell ourselves to make its bearing easier. There have been many times in my life when I have wished it was not so. But it is so.
Joe Abercrombie
But the thing I remember most about the screening in October twenty years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand that had gone numb on the armrest separating our seats. He did this because in the book Julian Wells lived but in the movie's new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all of his sins. That's what the movie demanded. (Later, as a screenwriter, I learned it's what all movies demanded.) When this scene occurred, in the last ten minutes, Julian looked at me in the darkness, stunned. "I died," he whispered. "They killed me off." I waited a bit before sighing, "But you're still here." Julian turned back to the screen and soon the movie ended, the credits rolling over the palm trees as I (improbably) take Blair back to my college while Roy Orbison wails a song about how life fades away.
Bret Easton Ellis
When statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.
Robert Bolt
This is what you have to ask yourself: Do you want to be good, or just seem good? Do you want to be good to yourself and others? Do you care about other people, always, sometimes, never? Or only when convenient? What kind of person do you want to be?
Charles Yu
We need more moral compasses and less Sat Navs
Dean Cavanagh
Generally speaking, if you think something you want to do is wrong, it is.
Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis
The good Lord wouldn't have put it in your heart if it wasn't right.
Neal Shusterman
Just as my body had changed at puberty, now I was developing a sense of guilt, a sense not only of how I appeared to others, but of how I appeared to myself, especially in violating self-imposed prohibitions.
Hanif Kureishi
The crimes the law can understand are not the worst crimes.
Larry McMurtry
The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good." -- Abraham Lincoln, Original Quote
Seth Grahame-Smith
Such grave matters as sin and forgiveness should remain between man and God
Stephen King
...we know there's a third choice. An alternative to staying simon-pure or bathing in the filth and the slime. It's the alternative that grown-ups all over the world pick. You balance off your walk through the hog-wallow against what it gains you. You choose the lesser of two evils and try to keep your good intentions on front of you. And I guess you judge how well you're doing by how well you sleep at night...and what your dreams are like.
Stephen King
Naughtiness is a diamond of childhood.
Aabid Surti
It's because even a good man can't always be right, that we need ... rules.
John Irving
I wrote Unwind for lots of reasons, and it poses questions about alot of subjects. To state it briefly, I wanted to point out how when peopletake intractable positions on an issue, and stick to extreme sides,sometimes the result is a compromise that is worse than either extreme. Imeant it as a wake up call to society -- and to point out that sometimes theproblem IS that we take sides on an issue, when a different sort of approachis needed. It's also to pose questions about what it means to be alive.Where does life begin, where does it end -- and point out that there is nosingle answer to these questions. The problem is people who think there aresimple answers. People who see things as simple black-and-whiteright-and-wrong are the type of people who will end up with a world like theworld in Unwind.
Neal Shusterman
An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental.
Richard Russo
I have been made to realize tonight that there are limits to what I wish to do or see done for any cause.
Guy Gavriel Kay
Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral.
Gore Vidal
Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?
Cormac McCarthy
Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.
Mae West
People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.
Stephen King
A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.
George R.R. Martin
If you can't do something smart, do something right.
Joss Whedon
My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone.
Bret Easton Ellis
Mary Fisher lives in a High Tower, on the edge of the sea: she writes a great deal about the nature of love. She tells lies.
Faye Weldon
Once you kill all of us, and you're alone, you'll die! The hate will die. That hate is what moves you, nothing else! That envy moves you. Nothing else! You'll die, inevitably. You're not immortal. You're not even alive, you're nothing but moving hate.
Ray Bradbury
J!m squinted his first hate of the day.
Larry Doyle
Aren't you getting tired of people hating one another? What do they think they get out of it?
Roger Ebert
She wanted to get at the hate of them all, to pry at it and work at it until she found a little chink, and then pull out a pebble or a stone or a brick and then a part of the wall, and, once started, the whole edifice might roar down and be done away with.
Ray Bradbury
I was brought up Christian, then I was agnostic and then I realized I was atheist... This movie [Agora] is about fundamentalism and hate.
Alejandro Amenábar
And I'd be willing to bet that you were great at it, if only because you have to love something before you can hate it.
Nicholas Sparks
It is strange how you shall hate a man, and yet pity him from the depths.
Richard Llewellyn
she hated everything her parents loved
Stephen Chbosky
We both disliked rude rickshwalas, shepu bhaji in any form, group photographs at weddings, lizards, tea that has gone cold, the habit of taking newspaper to the toilet, kissing a boy who'd just smoked a cigarette et cetra. Another list. The things we loved: strong coffee, Matisse, Rumi, summer rain, bathing together, Tom Hanks, rice pancakes, Cafe Sunrise, black-and-white photographs, the first quiet moments after you wake up in the morning.
Sachin Kundalkar
There is nothing so moving - not even acts of love or hate - as the discovery that one is not alone.
Robert Ardrey