Coming-of-age films

4177 quotes found

"We all had a drink. Except for the cat, and that's important. The water tasted like... heaven. It floated over your tongue like a cloud. Tuck carved a T in the trunk and we moved on west to find a place to settle down. We put up a house for Mae and Tuck and a little shed for Jesse and me. That was the first time we figured there was something... peculiar. Jesse fell thirty feet and landed on is neck. He was up on his feet before Mae could work up a good cry. Didn't hurt him a bit, no broken bones... nothing. But that's not all... not by a long shot. Things began to happen. Some brush-poppers mistook Mae's horse for a deer. Thing is, the bullets didn't kill him. Barely even left a mark. Then Tuck got bitten by a rattlesnake, and you know what... he didn't die. But the cat did, of old age. And Miles got married. Tuck figured it early on. It was the spring. We all drank from it, even the horse. It had to be... the source of our changelessness. I begged her to come back... to me and find the spring and drink from it. The children, too. It was our only hope... to be together. She'd made up her mind that I'd... sold my soul to the devil. And she left me. She took my babies with her. Everyone... pulled away after that. There was talk of witchcraft... and... black magic. I went lookin' for wars to fight... and I saw brave men die at Vera Cruz. And then Gettysburg. Thousands of them in the blink of an eye. But not me. I couldn't die. Like Little Anna. The influenza took her before she was fifteen. And Bo. He'd be almost eighty now if he were still alive. And my sweet... my sweet young bride. She died in an insane asylum. Old and alone. But I'm still here... I'm still here."

- Tuck Everlasting (2002 film)

0 likesComing-of-age filmsFantasy filmsFilms based on novelsPeriod filmsRemake films
"You know, because once you go to L.A., you're gonna have friends like crazy. But they're gonna be fake friends. You know, they're gonna try to corrupt you. You got an honest face, and they're gonna tell you everything. But you cannot make friends with the rock stars...If you're gonna be a true journalist -- you know, a rock journalist -- first, you never get paid much. But you will get free records from the record company. Jesus. Fucking nothing about you that is controversial, man. God, it's gonna get ugly, man. They're gonna buy you drinks. You're gonna meet girls, they're gonna try to fly you places for free, offer you drugs. I know. It sounds great, but these people are not your friends. You know, these are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of rock stars. And they will ruin rock 'n' roll, and strangle everything we love about it, right? You know, because they're trying to buy respectability for a form that is gloriously and righteously dumb. Now, you're smart enough to know that. And the day it ceases to be dumb is the day that it ceases to be real, right? And then it just becomes an industry of cool. I'm-I'm telling ya, you're comin' along at a very dangerous time for rock 'n' roll. I mean, the war is over. They won. And 99% of what passes for rock 'n' roll these days, silence is more compelling. That's why I think you should just turn around and go back, you know, and be a lawyer or somethin'. But I can tell from your face that you won't. I can give you 35 bucks. Give me a thousand words on Black Sabbath...Hey, you have to make your reputation on being honest and, uh, you know, unmerciful...If you get into a jam, you can call me. I stay up late."

- Almost Famous

0 likesComing-of-age filmsDrama filmsMusical filmsRoad comedy-drama filmsFilms about journalists
"All right people, here we are. This is the day. In one hour, you are going to take an exam, one administered by the state to test your basic skills, along with the quality of education here at Eastside High. And I want to tell you what the people out there are saying about you and what they think about your chances. They say that you're inferior! That you are just a bunch of niggers and spics and poor white trash! Education is wasted on you! You cannot learn! You're lost! I mean all of you! I want all the white students to stand up. All my white students. Stand up. Right now. Stand up. C'mon, all my white students, stand up, stand up. That's it. C'mon, stand up...These are my white children, and they're the same as all of you! They've got no place to go. If they had, they would have abandoned us a long time ago like everybody else did. But they couldn't. So here they are at Eastside High, just like the rest of us. You can sit down. Are you getting my point, people? Is it beginning to sink in? We sink, we swim, we rise, we fall. We meet our fate together! Now, it took the help of a good, good friend to make me know and understand that. And I do understand it. And I'm grateful. I'm eternally grateful...And now, I've got a message for those people out there who've abandoned you and written you off! Can you hear me? CAN YOU HEAR ME? Good!...You are not inferior! Your grades may be. Your school may have been. But you can turn all of that around and make liars out of those bastards in exactly one hour, when you take that test and pass it and win! So here's what I want you to do: When you find your minds wandering, I want you to knuckle back down and concentrate. Concentrate! Remember what's at stake. And show them what Eastside High is all about, a spirit that will not die!"

- Lean on Me

0 likesComing-of-age filmsDrama filmsHigh school filmsFilms set in New JerseyFilms based on true stories
"[at an assembly] I want all of you to take a good look at these people on the risers behind me. These people have been here up to five years, and done absolutely nothing. These are drug dealers and drug users. They have taken up space. They have disrupted this school. They have harassed your teachers. And they have intimidated you. Well, times are about to change. You will not be bothered in Joe Clark's school. These people are incorrigible. And since none of them could graduate anyway... [to those onstage] ...you are all expurgated. You are dismissed! You are out of here, forever. I wish you well! Mr. Wright... [after Security Dean William Wright and Eastside's new guards eject all the "problem" kids from school, Clark's audience in the decaying auditorium grows silent] Next time, it may be you. If you do no better than they did, next time, it will be you. They said this school was dead, like the cemetery it's built on. But we call our Eastside teams "Ghosts", don't we? And what are ghosts? Ghosts are spirits that rise from the dead. I want you to be my ghosts. You are going to lead our resurrection, by defying the expectation that all of us are doomed to failure. My motto is simple: If you do not succeed in life, I don't want you to blame your parents. I don't want you to blame the white man. I want you to blame yourselves. The responsibility is yours! In two weeks we have a practice exam, and the Minimum Basic Skills Test on April 13. That's 110 school days from now. But it's not just about those test scores. If you do not have these basic skills, you will find yourselves locked out. Locked out of that American dream that you see advertised on TV, that they tell you is so easy to get. You are here for one reason. One reason only: To learn. To work for what you want. The alternative is to waste your time and to fall into the trap of crime, drugs, and death. Does everyone understand that? Do all of you understand me? Then welcome to the new Eastside High."

- Lean on Me

0 likesComing-of-age filmsDrama filmsHigh school filmsFilms set in New JerseyFilms based on true stories
"[Atticus' closing argument in the trial against Tom Robinson] To begin with, this case should never have come to trial. The state has not produced one iota of medical evidence that the crime Tom Robinson is charged with ever took place... It has relied instead upon the testimony of two witnesses, whose evidence has not only been called into serious question on cross-examination, but has been flatly contradicted by the defendant. Now, there is circumstantial evidence to indicate that Mayella Ewell was beaten - savagely, by someone who led exclusively with his left. And Tom Robinson now sits before you having taken the oath with the only good hand he possesses: his right. I have nothing but pity in my heart for the chief witness for the State. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance. But my pity does not extend so far as to her putting a man's life at stake, which she has done in an effort to get rid of her own guilt. Now I say "guilt," gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She's committed no crime - she has merely broken a rigid and time-honoured code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She must destroy the evidence of her offense. But what was the evidence of her offense? Tom Robinson, a human being. She must put Tom Robinson away from her. Tom Robinson was to her a daily reminder of what she did. Now, what did she do? She tempted a Negro. She was white, and she tempted a Negro. She did something that, in our society, is unspeakable. She kissed a black man. Not an old uncle, but a strong, young Negro man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards. The witnesses for the State, with the exception of the sheriff of Maycomb County, have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court, in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption, the evil assumption, that all Negroes lie, all Negroes are basically immoral beings, all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women. An assumption that one associates with minds of their calibre, and which is, in itself, gentlemen, a lie, which I do not need to point out to you. And so, a quiet, humble, respectable Negro, who has had the unmitigated temerity to feel sorry for a white woman, has had to put his word against two white people's! The defendant is not guilty - but somebody in this courtroom is. Now, gentlemen, in this country, our courts are the great levellers. In our courts, all men are created equal. I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and of our jury system - that's no ideal to me. That is a living, working reality! Now I am confident that you gentlemen will review, without passion, the evidence that you have heard, come to a decision and restore this man to his family. In the name of God, do your duty. In the name of God, believe... Tom Robinson."

- To Kill a Mockingbird (film)

0 likes1960s American filmsComing-of-age filmsCrime filmsDrama filmsFilms based on novels
"To get quickly to the point, Four Friends is the best film yet made about the sixties, that harrowed time of war, prosperity, and broken promises, of turning on and dropping out to colors described as psychedelic, when establishment came to be written with a capital "E." … It's a film that embraces the looks, sounds, speech, and public events of the sixties, but not in the way of a documentary. It has the quality of legend, a fable remembered. The title is somewhat misleading, for although Four Friends is about the coming of age of three young men and the young woman they each love in turn, it's principally the story of Danilo Prozor (Craig Wasson). Danilo is the Yugoslavian-born son of immigrant parents, who arrives in this country in 1948 at the age of twelve and spends the next decade and a half sorting out the reality of America from his dream of it … Danilo never refers to this country as the United States but always as America — it's not a political union but a concept from childhood. …Four Friends is about ordinary people, but not ordinary people who speak a predictable, commonplace vernacular. They take leaps into the unknown and occasionally come up spouting what sounds like rubbish, which is part of the film's extraordinary style and what separates it from a kind of fiction that aspires to do nothing more than reproduce actuality. Mr. Wasson is very fine in a long difficult role that, I assume, is the beginning of a major film career, but then there's not a shabby performance in the picture. Four Friends … is one of Mr. Penn's most deeply felt achievements, ranking alongside Bonnie and Clyde, Alice's Restaurant, and Little Big Man. For Mr. Tesich, it is another original work by one of our best young screenwriters."

- Four Friends (film)

0 likesComing-of-age filmsDrama filmsRomance filmsFilms directed by Arthur Penn
"Somewhere in the middle of My Dinner With Andre, Andre Gregory wonders aloud if it's not possible that the 1960s were the last decade when we were all truly alive — that since then we've sunk into a bemused state of self-hypnosis, placated by consumer goods and given the illusion of excitement by television. Walking out of Four Friends, I had some of the same thoughts. This movie brings the almost unbelievable contradictions of that decade into sharp relief, not as nostalgia or as a re-creation of times past, but as a reliving of all of the agony and freedom of the weirdest ten years any of us is likely to witness. … The movie is ambitious. It wants to take us on a tour of some of the things that happened in the 1960s, and some of the ways four midwestern kids might have responded to them. It also wants to be a meditation on love, and on how love changes during the course of a decade. … The wonder is not that Four Friends covers so much ground, but that it makes many of its scenes so memorable that we learn more even about the supporting characters than we expect to. … this is a movie that remembers times past with such clarity that there are times it seems to be making it all up. Did we really say those things? Make those assumptions? Live on the edge of what seemed to be a society gone both free and mad at once? Some critics have said the people and events in this movie are not plausible. I don't know if they're denying the movie's truth, or arguing that from a 1980s point of view the '60s were just a bad dream. Or a good one."

- Four Friends (film)

0 likesComing-of-age filmsDrama filmsRomance filmsFilms directed by Arthur Penn
"Let me put it this way: Who wants to destroy the Jews? Who wants to grind their bones into the dust? And who wants to see them rise again? Wealthier, more successful, powerful, cultured, more intelligent than ever? Then you know what we have to do? We have to love 'em. What? Did he say Love the Jews? It's strange, I know. But with these people, nothing is simple. The Jew says all he wants is to be left alone to study his Torah... do a little business... fornicate with his oversexed wife,but it's not true. He wants to be hated. He longs for our scorn. He clings to it, as if it were the very core of his being. If Hitler had not existed, the Jews would've invented him. For without such hatred, the so-called Chosen People would vanish from the earth. And this reveals a terrible truth and the crux of our problem as Nazis. The worse the Jews are treated, the stronger they become. Egyptian slavery made them a nation. The pogroms hardened them. Auschwitz gave birth to the state of Israel. Suffering, it seems, is the very crucible of their genius. So, if the Jews are,as one of their own has said... a people who will not take yes for an answer... let us say yes to them. They thrive on opposition. Let us cease to oppose them. The only way to annihilate this insidious people once and for all... is to open our arms, invite them into our homes... and embrace them. Only then will they vanish into assimilation, normality and love."

- The Believer (2001 film)

0 likesDrama filmsAmerican independent filmsSundance Film Festival award–winning filmsComing-of-age filmsFilms about racism
"[addressing the town council] I wasn't here three years ago, when tragedy struck this town. And I know it's not my place to mourn the lives that were lost because I didn't know them. But it doesn't mean that I don't think about them every day. Like a lot of students at Bomont, I see those pictures every day at school. And each time I see their faces, I think of how precious life is and how quickly it can be taken from us. I know this firsthand... in my own way. And three years ago, nearly a dozen laws were introduced to this council in order to protect the children of Bomont. And most of these laws, I can see, as a parent, how they make sense to you. But my right to dance... when I want, where I want, and how I want is a right that you cannot take away! It is mine. See, we don't have that much time left. All us teenagers, pretty soon we're gonna be just like you. We're gonna have jobs, and bills, and families. And we're gonna have to worry about our own children, because that is the job of a parent. To worry. I get that. But outs, as teenagers, is to live! To play our music way too loud and to act like idiots! And to make mistakes. Aren't we told in Psalm 149: "Praise the Lord. Sing unto the Lord a new song. And let them praise his name in the dance." Now if anybody else brought their bible, like I did, will you please turn it into the Book of Samuel, 6:14. "David... David danced before the Lord with all his might, leaping and dancing before the Lord." Celebrating his love of God and celebrating his love of life. With what? With dancing! That's all we're doing here. Ecclesiastes assures us, "There is a time for each purpose under heaven. There's a time to weep. There's a time to mourn. And there is a time to dance." And this is our time! There was once a time for that law, but not anymore. Thank you."

- Footloose (2011 film)

0 likes2010s American filmsDance filmsComedy-drama filmsMusical filmsComing-of-age films
"[in a letter] Of course, Randy, it is a ghastly and terrible tragedy, particularly to have happened to Drake. He lived by his freedom and independence. He will feel, probably already feels, that he's lost both. It'll be your problem to restore them to him. The repairs to the body can sometimes be made in a short space of time. The injury to the mind, to what is called the psyche, this takes longer. The psychic injuries strike at his pride, his initiative, and we shall have to save them if we're to save Drake. Never when I decided to become a psychiatrist did I imagine I'd be writing my first prescription for my dearest friend. As soon as he's well enough, he must find an interest outside of himself. Some job to do that will force him to depend upon himself and make his own decisions. The helpless invalid complex must be avoided at all cost. In fact, he must be made to feel that since he was making a living for himself he will, of course, go on making a living. I've written to the bank instructing them to turn over to you the small Tower estate that was left me. Use it to make some sort of a new beginning for you. I don't care if it's real estate or chicken farming, so long as it is something that will take his mind off himself and make him realize that he's still some use in this world. I feel so helpless being way over here. I rely on you. You must obey my instructions faithfully."

- Kings Row

0 likes1940s American filmsComing-of-age filmsFilms based on novelsTeen drama filmsFilms about psychiatry
"[voice-over] There are times in your life when you find yourself in very awkward situations. And this would be one of those moments. But I swear, it's not like I'm selling my kidney or anything. Although, that would have been less painful. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning. This is my dad. Dad built engines for race cars. And so did I. Ignore the pigtails. I was more naive back then. Because of his work, I changed schools two times a year for the past eight years. This doesn't make me a loner with a highly evolved defense mechanism or anything. OK, fine, it does. Today, everything was about to change. It was my first day at North Shore High, the last stop before Carnegie Mellon University, my dream school. My rules of survival were simple: Don't stand out, never raise your hand in class and watch your back at all times. New town, same school, same parking lot. Everyone obsessed with the freedom of their first car. It's an identity, like the muscle cars who think they own the road, and check out every passing vehicle. Smart cars who don't fit in. The "I'm so perky I might shake off my tube top" cutesy cars. And then there's the most dangerous vehicle on the road, the high-performance, high-maintenance sports cars. If they liked you, your life was all green lights. If they didn't, you were nothing more than a wreck on the side of the road. At North Shore, they were called the Plastics, and Mandi Weatherly was the number one Plastic. She dotted her name with a signature heart above the "i". Probably because she didn't actually possess that organ. Her two sidekicks were Chastity Meyer, who was stupid enough to hit a home run with any boy willing to play, and Hope Plotkin, uber-hypochondriac, who believed that germs led to ugliness, and ugliness led to death. And thus, my number one rule for survival: no girl drama. Actually, no drama, period. And in high school, an already embarrassing moment can go from bad... to worse."

- Mean Girls 2

0 likes2000s American filmsComing-of-age filmsTeen comedy filmsHigh school filmsFilms about friendship