128 quotes found
"I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my nightmare: crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor and surviving."
"Have you ever considered any real freedoms? Freedoms from the opinion of others... even the opinions of yourself?"
"As long as cold beer, hot food, rock 'n' roll, and all the other amenities remain expected norm, our conduct of the war will only gain impotence."
"I've seen horrors, horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that, but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror! Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies."
"I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile, a pile of little arms. And I remember I...I...I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized, like I was shot — like I was shot with a diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God, the genius of that. The genius! The will to do that: perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand it. These were not monsters. These were men, trained cadres — these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who have children, who are filled with love — but they had the strength — the strength! — to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment. Without judgment! Because it's judgment that defeats us."
"We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!"
"I worry that my son might not understand what I've tried to be. And if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything — everything I did, everything you saw — because there's nothing that I detest more than the stench of lies. And if you understand me, Willard, you will do this for me."
"The horror ... the horror. [These are Kurtz's last words, and parallel those of the novella's Mr. Kurtz character.]"
"[voiceover] Saigon. Shit. I'm still only in Saigon. Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle. When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife until I said "yes" to a divorce. When I was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. I'm here a week now, waiting for a mission, getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger. Each time I looked around, the walls moved in a little tighter."
"[voiceover] Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another."
"[voiceover] I was going to the worst place in the world, and I didn't even know it yet. Weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked through the war like a main circuit cable plugged straight into Kurtz. It was no accident that I got to be the caretaker of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz's memory any more than being back in Saigon was an accident. There is no way to tell his story without telling my own. And if his story really is a confession, then so is mine."
"[voiceover] Charlie didn't get much USO. He was dug in too deep or moving too fast. His idea of great R&R was cold rice and a little rat meat. He had only two ways home: death or victory."
"[voiceover] It's a way we had over here with living with ourselves. We cut 'em in half with a machine gun and give 'em a Band-Aid. It was a lie, and the more I saw them, the more I hated lies. Those boys were never gonna look at me the same way again, but I felt like I knew one or two things about Kurtz that weren't in the dossier. Do Lung Bridge was the last Army outpost in the Nung River. Beyond it, there was only Kurtz."
"[voiceover] Oh, man. The bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam you needed wings to stay above it."
"[reading a letter Kurtz has sent to his son] Dear son, I'm afraid that both you and your mother will have been worried at not hearing from me during the past weeks, but my situation here has become a difficult one. I've been officially accused of murder by the Army. The alleged victims were four Vietnamese double agents. We spent months uncovering them and accumulating evidence. When absolute proof was completed, we acted. We acted like soldiers. The charges are unjustified. They are, in fact, and in the circumstances of this conflict, quite completely insane. In a war, there are many moments for compassion and tender action. There are many moments for ruthless action — what is often called ruthless, what may in many circumstances be only clarity — seeing clearly what there is to be done and doing it directly, quickly, awake, looking at it. I will trust you to tell your mother what you choose about this letter. As for the charges against me, I am unconcerned. I am beyond their timid, lying morality, and so I am beyond caring. You have all my faith. Your loving father.""
"[voiceover] "Never get out of the boat." Absolutely goddamn right! Unless you were goin' all the way. Kurtz got off the boat. He split from the whole fuckin' program."
"[voiceover] Part of me was afraid of what I would find and what I would do when I got there. I knew the risks, or imagined I knew. But the thing I felt the most, much stronger than fear, was the desire to confront him."
"[voiceover] They were gonna make me a major for this, and I wasn't even in their fucking army anymore. Everybody wanted me to do it, him most of all. I felt like he was up there, waiting for me to take the pain away. He just wanted to go out like a soldier, standing up, not like some poor, wasted, rag-assed renegade. Even the jungle wanted him dead, and that's who he really took his orders from anyway."
"[voiceover] If the generals back in Nha Trang could see what I saw, would they still want me to kill him? More than ever probably."
"You smell that? Do you smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell — you know that gasoline smell — the whole hill smelled like... victory. Someday this war's gonna end."
"Charlie don't surf!"
"[after being given a "tour" of Kurtz's camp, which contained rows of human heads impaled on spikes and displayed around ancient temples, Chef is horrified] "This Colonel guy? He's wacko, man! He's far worse than crazy, he's evil! I mean, that's what the man's got set up here. It's fuckin' pagan idolatry! Look around you. Shit! He's loco... I ain't afraid of all them fuckin' skulls and altars and shit. I used to think if I died in an evil place, then my soul wouldn't be able to make it to Heaven. But now? Fuck, I mean, I don't care where it goes, as long as it ain't here! So whaddya wanna do? I'll kill the fuck...""
"This is dialectics. It's very simple dialectics: one through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know, without like, you know, with fractions! What are you going to land on, one quarter, three eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something? That's dialectic physics, okay?"
"This is the way the world ends. Look at this shit we're in man. Not with a bang, but with a whimper, and with a whimper, I'm splitting, Jack. [Note: This is a variation on T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men – "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper".]"
"[talking to Willard about Kurtz] Why? Why would a nice guy like you want to kill a genius? Going down pretty good, huh? Why? Do you know that the man really likes you? He likes you. He really likes you. But he's got something in mind for you. Aren't you curious about that? I'm curious. I'm very curious. Are you curious? There's something happening out here, man. You know something, man? I know something you that you don't know. That's right, Jack. The man is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad. Oh, yeah. He's dying, I think. He hates all this. He hates it! But the man's a...he reads poetry out loud, alright? And a voice...he likes you because you're still alive. He's got plans for you. No, I'm not gonna help you. You're gonna help him, man. You're gonna help him. I mean, what are they gonna say, man, when he's gone? 'Cause he dies when it dies, man! When it dies, he dies! What are they gonna say about him? What? Are they gonna say he was a kind man? He was a wise man? He had plans? He had wisdom? Bullshit, man! And am I gonna be the one that's gonna set them straight? Look at me! Wrong! [points to Willard] You!"
"Lt. Gen. R. Corman: Well, you see, Willard, in this war, things get confused out there: power, ideals, the old morality, practical military necessity. But out there with these natives, it must be a temptation to be God, because there's a conflict in every human heart, between the rational and the irrational, between good and evil, and good does not always triumph. Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. Every man has got a breaking point. You and I have one. Walter Kurtz has reached his, and very obviously, he has gone insane."
"Hubert de Marais: [Redux version] See, Captain, when my grandfather and my uncle's father came here there was nothing. The Vietnamese were nothing. So we worked hard, very hard, and brought rubber from Brazil and then planted here. We took the Vietnamese, work with them, make something: something out of nothing. So when you ask me why we want to stay here, Captain, we want to stay here because it's ours. It belongs to us. It keeps our family together. I mean, we fight for that, while you Americans — you are fighting for the biggest nothing in all of history!"
"My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane."
"Marlon Brando - Colonel Walter E. Kurtz"
"Robert Duvall - Lieutenant Colonel William "Bill" Kilgore"
"Martin Sheen - Captain Benjamin L. Willard"
"Frederic Forrest - Engineman Third Class Jay "Chef" Hicks"
"Albert Hall - Quartermaster George "Chief" Phillips"
"Sam Bottoms - Lance B. Johnson"
"Laurence Fishburne - Gunner's Mate 3rd Class Tyrone "Mr. Clean" Miller"
"Dennis Hopper - Photojournalist"
"Harrison Ford - Colonel G. Lucas"
"G.D. Spradlin - Lieutenant General Corman"
"Jerry Ziesmer - Jerry"
"Scott Glenn - Lieutenant Richard M. Colby"
"Aurore Clement - Roxanne Sarrault"
"Cynthia Wood - Playmate of the year"
"The Horror. . . The Horror. . ."
"This is the end..."
"To the victims go the spoils."
"MORNING SMELLS Some People Like Coffee. Some People Like Napalm."
"It is impossible to describe what is necessary, to those who do not know what horror means. You must make a friend of horror."
"When I was a boy, I used to, uh, used to read all about Edison and the Wright Brothers, Mr. Ford. They were my heroes. 'Rags to Riches' - that's not just the name of a book. That's what this country was all about. We invented the 'free enterprise' system, where anybody, no matter who he was, where he came from, what class he belonged to - if he came up with a better idea about anything, there's no limit to how far he could go. I grew up a generation too late, I guess, because now the way the system works, the loner, the dreamer, the crackpot who comes up with some crazy idea that everybody laughs at, that later turns out to revolutionize the world - he's squashed from above before he even gets his head out of the water because the bureaucrats, they'd rather kill a new idea than let it rock the boat! If Benjamin Franklin were alive today, he'd be thrown in jail for sailing a kite without a license! [jury laughs] It's true! We're all puffed up with ourselves now 'cause we invented the bomb - dropped the - beat the daylights out of the Japanese, the Nazis. But if big business closes the door on the little guy with a new idea, we're not only closing the door on progress, but we're sabotaging everything that we fought for! Everything that the country stands for!! And one day we're gonna find ourselves at the bottom of the heap instead of king of the hill, having no idea how we got there, buying our radios and our cars from our former enemies. [A juror laughs] I don't believe that's gonna happen. I can't believe it because - if I ever stop believing in the plain 'ol common horse sense of the American people, be no way I could get out of bed in the morning. Thank you."
"When I was a little kid, maybe five years old, in the old country, my mother used to say to me; she'd warn me, she'd say, 'Don't get too close to people. You'll catch their dreams...Years later, I realized I misunderstood her. 'Germs', she said, not 'dreams', 'You'll catch their germs... [they both laugh] I want you to know something, Tucker. I went into business with you for one reason - to make money. That's all... How was I to know... [chokes up, head down] if I got too close, I'd catch your dreams."
"Although only fifty Tuckers were ever produced, forty six of them are still road worthy and in use today. Tucker's innovations of aerodynamic styling, padded dash, pop out windows, seat belts, fuel injection and disc brakes were slowly adopted by Detroit and are found in the cars you are driving now. Preston Tucker died of an illness six years after the trial, but his ideas will live forever."
"Jeff Bridges - Preston Tucker"
"Joan Allen - Vera Tucker"
"Martin Landau - Abe Karatz"
"Elias Koteas - Alex Tremulis"
"Frederic Forrest - Eddie Dean"
"Christian Slater - Preston Tucker, Jr."
"Don Novello - Stan"
"Nina Siemaszko - Marilyn Lee Tucker"
"Mako - Jimmy Sakuyama"
"Dean Stockwell - Howard Hughes"
"Lloyd Bridges - Senator Homer Ferguson"
"Charlie, it's like there's this window into my heart and you can open and crawl in whenever you want. Well, I've got to close it or nothing is ever going to change."
"Well, what's the point of being a teenager if you can't dress weird?"
"Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?"
"Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently? Peggy Sue is going back with the chance to change her destiny."
"She awoke in the past with a chance to rebuild her future."
"A film about love and life and the chance to change them both."
"Kathleen Turner - Peggy Sue Bodell"
"Nicolas Cage - Charlie Bodell"
"Barry Miller - Richard Norvik"
"Catherine Hicks - Carol Heath"
"Joan Allen - Maddy Nagle"
"Kevin J. O'Connor - Michael Fitzsimmons"
"Jim Carrey - Walter Getz"
"Lisa Jane Persky - Delores Dodge"
"Lucinda Jenney - Rosalie Testa"
"Wil Shriner - Arthur Nagle"
"Barbara Harris - Evelyn Kelcher"
"Don Murray - Jack Kelcher"
"Sofia Coppola - Nancy Kelcher"
"Maureen O'Sullivan - Elizabeth Alvorg"
"Leon Ames - Barney Alvorg"
"Helen Hunt - Beth Bodell"
"Glenn Withrow - Terry"
"Don't be superstitious, it's bad luck."
"[singing] Green is the color of the shamrocks /and the grass on Blarney hill / Oh, the darlin' green of Ireland /and the good old dollar bill."
"My family's been having nothing but trouble with immigrants ever since they come to this country!"
"[dictating a speech to Buzz] Gentlemen, the festering tides of radicalism are upon us. But before I yield up our glorious South -and her sister commonwealth, the U.S. of A - I will lay down my life. I will do more - I will filibuster. Back, you crackpots! Forward, America! Forward to the hallowed principles of our forefathers. Forward to the sweet tranquility of the status quo. Forward... to yesterday!"
"[singing] When I'm not near the girl I love/ I love the girl I'm near!"
"What fools these mortals be!"
"Let yourself glow"
"If all you want out of a movie is a great, big, wonderful time - just follow the rainbow - whistle the songs - and join in the fun."
"Fred Astaire — Finian McLonergan"
"Petula Clark — Sharon McLonergan"
"Tommy Steele — Og"
"Don Francks — Woody Mahoney"
"Keenan Wynn — Senator Billboard Rawkins"
"Barbara Hancock — Susan the Silent"
"Al Freeman Jr. — Howard"
"Ronald Colby — Buzz Collins"
"Dolph Sweet — Sheriff"
"Wright King — District Attorney"
"Louil Silas — Henry"
"Mother, I don't care what tragedy hangs over this family. I want to get married. I'm engaged to be married. I'm going to get married."
"Castle Haloran is a bit perplexing, a very strange place really, old and musty, the kind of place you'd expect a ghost to like to wander around in."
"The typewriter. He wouldn't forget that. He'd have to write letters on the plane. I wonder if he'll rot under water?"
"You know, the one thing in the world that really chills my bones to the marrow is when a pretty girl in a wedding dress looks at me and finds me repulsive."
"Drink's the only road to survival in this climate. Despite your useless American education, you're still Irish, you know. Drink up."
"I've known this family for a very long time. I've been aware of the atmosphere of depression and the slightly demented quality that hangs over it."
"I've discovered things in this house that make me uneasy."
"These nursery rhymes are notoriously expressive."
"Billy Haloran: [singing] Fishy, Fishy, In the brook, Daddy caught you, On a hook..."
"Kane: Sometimes I get the feeling you think I'm some sort of a Christmas Tree decoration. Hang me up and look at me on all happy days and tie me up and put me in a box when it gets gloomy."
"Simon: Forgive me, Miss. The last thing in the world old Simon would want to do is to frighten a fresh, young beauty - like yourself."
"Simon: Don't turn me over to the bulls."
"Are You Afraid of Death by Drowning?... Have You Ever Attempted Suicide?... Have you Ever Thought of Committing Murder?"
"You Must Pass the "D-13" Test To Prepare You for the Horrifying Experience of Dementia 13. If You Fail the Test...You Will Be Asked to Leave the Theater!"
"William Campbell — Richard Haloran"
"Luana Anders — Louise Haloran"
"Patrick Magee — Dr. Justin Caleb"
"Bart Patton — Billy Haloran"
"Mary Mitchell — Kane"
"Eithne Dunne — Lady Haloran"
"Peter Read — John Haloran"
"Karl Schnazer — Simon, the poacher"
"Ron Perry — Arthur"
"Derry O'Donovan — Lillian, the maid"
"Barbara Dowling — Kathleen Haloran"