Powder (film)

"I could never watch television."

"I want to go home. Do you understand that? I want to go home. … I saw that I don't like what you do. Any of you. … You pretend to be my friend, the way you pretend everything. A friend doesn't lock you up. A friend doesn't take you away from your home, and say that its for your own good. How long do you really think I'll let you keep me here?"

"They were afraid to touch me after a while — my grandma and grandpa. They got really scared."

"Have you ever listened to people from the inside? Listened so close you can hear their thoughts — and all their memories. Hear them think from places they don't even know they think from?"

"She says she believes in miracles now, and that you should too. … She thinks I'm an angel. Come to take her home, and to bring you and Steven together again, and remind you of how much you still are in each other's hearts."

"She didn't go some place… your wife. I felt her go. Not "away", just "out" — everywhere."

"I'm telling you. I've never seen anything like him. … Because of the way he's lived — he doesn't seem to know what things are. I mean, things you and I take for granted, common everyday objects, simple ideas. I just don't think he's ever been exposed to them. He's about the most well-read teenage kid you could ever meet, but in other ways, I think he's a lot like a little child."

"That was some light-show. People are going to be talking about that to their grandkids grandkids around here."

"Energy, always relaying, always transforming, and never-ending."

"Something's happened here. Something's happened here. I'm telling you, with everything we know, about science, about the makeup of the human body, what happened in that classroom is impossible. That kid attracted an arc of electricity from thirty feet away, and not just from the Jacob's Ladder, I mean, after a second it was like it was coming out of the whole… building."

"We're stumbling around in a very dark age basically trying not to kill each other. So it hurts me when you say "So what?" Because you are not just different, Jeremy, I think you have a mind that we won't evolve to for like thousands of years — you're maybe the man of the future right here and now."

"We've got something out here nobody's gonna believe."

"I got twenty different kids telling me twenty different stories."

"You ever see so many goddamned lightning rods on one house?"

"That kid, he lays his hand on the deer while it's still shaking, and then he touches me at the same time. Now, I can't figure out why — till my heart starts pounding, and I'm shaking, and I'm feeling myself hurt and scared shitless, slipping away in the goddamned dark. That's the worst thing I ever felt. Its like I could feel that animal dying. Hell, it was like I was the goddamned thing."

"Why you look like that? You look like some kind of vampire from outerspace or something."

"Don't look at me, man? … Did you hear what I said? … I don't like your eyes."

"Well, what you know — the boogeyman's afraid of lightning."

"There's not much fight in you, is there freak show? You really think you could be like us?"

"Everyone in this movie seems a little slow to catch on that Powder is really special. There is, for example, Duncan (Brandon Smith), the intolerant local deputy sheriff, a redneck who likes to shoot deer. The deer hardly feel a thing, he explains, but then Powder acts as a conduit to carry the deer's fear and suffering into the deputy, who is so transformed that he sells his gun collection — yet still plays the heavy, making things tough on Powder. To quote Citizen Kane, there are some people who need more than one lesson. … Powder comes across as a cross between Cliff Robertson's Charly, the Elephant Man, Mr. Spock, E. T. and Jesus. He is wise beyond his years, has great compassion and insight, suffers much, and attracts intolerance and meanness even better than lightning. He is also very smart. After an I.Q. test, for example, a psychologist tells him, "All of the tests indicate you have the most advanced intellect in the history of mankind. Do you understand what that means?" (If Powder's so smart, why does he have to ask?)"

"The movies mistakes are: (1) to limit Powder's activities to the conventions of genre pictures, instead of exploring his effect in a more realistic world; (2) to prevent his enemies from learning from him; (3) to upstage his emotional insights with his electricity tricks; (4) to fail to explain his reality, so that there are no rules to create discipline in the plot, and (5) to expect us to be satisfied with an ending that settles less the more you think about it. The sad thing is, when movies like this fail, Hollywood executives think this proves there are no audiences for original, unusual pictures. Because they think they made one."

"Pure energy has a name."

"An extraordinary encounter with another human being!"