"The world has just become...so inhuman. Everyone’s plugged in. Blindingly inarticulate. Obsessed with money, their careers. Stupidly, arrogantly content. I can’t talk to them. I fight them. I wanna destroy them even. I crave interaction. I crave it. But you just can’t anymore. They pull their devices out for every little thing, to reinforce their petty convenient notions. To decide where they’re going to shop, what they’re gonna eat, what movies they’re gonna watch, everything they ingest. Because what is left? My god. Okay. It’s like this is all a game and I haven’t been told what the rules are. Or even worse, if I had, I’m ill-equipped to follow them. All I can do is provoke. I become spiteful. I’m just as bad as they are. They? I’m... I’m worse. I fucking hate myself for it. I’m... I am so fucking lonely. Why is the world so base? Why is it so insensitive? Why is it so selfish? Why am I? I am not for this world."

"Well, like you say mom. Smart people, girls especially, are all fucked up."

"Kristen Stewart - Sophie"

"I used to believe in nothing; now I believe in everything."

"We can destroy cities, alter the planet irreversibly, speak instantaneously face-to-face from across the globe, create life where there was to be none, even while intoxicating ourselves with it all. And yet, how do we still seek purpose? And where do we hope to find it if we're so busy convincing ourselves there needn't be any? And so we wander, eyes closed to the dark, while technology, science, medicine and godlessness blaze illusions around us, with less to guide us now than ever, seemingly omnipotent, but more human and just as afraid."

"These quandaries do not end with this course in a week from today. They begin. And I certainly haven't taught these writers for 30 years just so you can drop references to existential thinkers and their antecedents at dinner parties. The crowd is untruth. In an era darkened by the false shade of imperviousness, you and those who pause to question, carry the light. It's been a wonderful 34 years. Let's not be strangers, either to one another, or more importantly, to everything we've learned from one another. May your best years be yet to come. And so for us all."

"But then, what do all these thinkers we've examined this semester have in common? If we truly explore to find a common thread? At the outset of a century that would constitute the bloodiest in human history. Along with scientific and technological advancements that would literally make us like Gods. Even as we began to dismantle the very meaning of God. They ask, what is a life? Does to live any longer have a how? Does it any longer have a why? Against a backdrop of industrialization, people will contend with alienation, dislocation, population on a mass scale, and murder on a mass scale. They'll consider the constraints of truth. Whether metaphor or paradigm, with many concluding actual truth has never existed. A nexus in the great human saga, when we dared to trade the organizing bliss, of good and evil, right and wrong, as determined by a creator for other opiates: communism, socialism, capitalism, psychology, technology, any learnable system to replace what had begun to evaporate: the 20th century. My own. But also the one into which each of you was born. For many, an era of hope liberation, possibility. For others of abandonment and despair. A most human century in which we begin really to understand that Nietzsche was right: we are beautifully, finally, achingly, alone."

"In this void, philosophy at its worst becomes self-reflective, linguistic, semantic, relativism having rendered any discussion of right and wrong, good and evil, to be the quaint concerns of another age. At its most provocative, it asks other questions. Those concerned with locating our stranded selves, when meaning seems to have died, nothing less, in short, then 'why do we live at all?' and 'what makes us who we are?' They ask, 'what now?' And we're still asking it. What will fortify us as another century, your century, commences? Do we abandon finally the search for truths that seem ever more elusive, even silly to some? The ethical? The moral? The good? Principles that by definition can never be prove when so much now can be proved? Or is all this finally and forever pointless? Are we done?"

"Glenn Close - Marcia Zarrow"

"Gretchen Mol - Sarah"

"Michael Köning - Ned, age 2"

"Alexander McIntosh - Ned, age 5"

"Hannah Davies - Charlotte, age 9"

"Caspar Norman - Sam"

"Chloe Billington - Charlotte, age 5"

"[after his wife tells him that she's been having an affair with his best friend] Where does it take place? Must be a bit awkward. I mean we've got two kids, he's got two kids not to mention a wife."

"Jeremy Irons - Jerry"

"Patricia Hodge - Emma"

"Ben Kingsley - Robert"

"Avril Elgar - Mrs. Banks"

"Ray Marioni - Waiter"

"Christian Slater - Nathaniel Bone"

"Max Irons - David Castleman"

"Jonathan Pryce - Professor Joseph Castleman"

"Behind any great man, there's always a greater woman"

"Secrets lie between the lines."

"Glenn Close - Joan Castleman"

"I feel like Old Man River. I'm tired of living and I'm scared of dying."

"Who is she? Who was she? Who does she hope to be?"

"You must never call anyone called Michael, Mickey. Those of us who are named Michael get very nervous about it."

"Your lips are turning blue. You look like you've been rimming a snowman."

"It's not always like it happens in plays. Not all faggots bump themselves off at the end of the story."

"Beware the hostile fag. When he's sober, he's dangerous. When he drinks, he's lethal."

"I just didn't think I could survive another hangover, that's all. Didn't think I could get through one more morning-after ick attack. [...] Icks. Anxiety. Guilt. From that split second when your eyes pop open, and you say, "My God, what did I do last night?" And then suddenly, zap. Total recall. [...] And then that struggle to survive until lunchtime, when you have a double bloody mary. That is, if you've waited till lunch. And then you're half pissed and useless for the rest of the afternoon. So you hang on till cocktail time. And by then, you're ready for what the evening holds, which hopefully is another party, where the whole goddamn cycle starts all over again. Yeah, well, I've been on that merry-go-round long enough. And I either had to get off or die of centrifugal force."

"You're a sad and pathetic man. You're a homosexual and you don't want to be, but there's nothing you can do to change it. Not all the prayers to your god, not all the analysis you can buy in all the years you've go left to live. You may one day be able to know a heterosexual life if you want it desperately enough. If you pursue it with the fervor with which you annihilate. But you'll always be homosexual as well. Always Michael. Always. Until the day you die."

"Who do you have to fuck to get a drink around here?"

"Show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse."

"Donald, you are a real card-carrying cunt."

"Today is Harold's birthday. This is his present."

"[deleted scene; visiting Viktor after the Moscow fight] I know how it feels. It may not seem like it now, but you gotta know: You’re more than just one fight. We both are."

"Reuben Greene as Bernard"

"Peter White as Alan McCarthy"