"Mrs. Cushing: Dr. Spezio, may I see you for a moment, Doctor, if you don't mind? Doctor is this your handwriting, if you don't mind? Am I supposed to read this? Was that a sprain? Was that a broken wrist? I can't read that scribbling. I mean I have to bill these people. I know you doctors are the ministering angels and I'm the bitch from the accounting department, but I've a job to do too. I mean, if you don't mind, Doctor."

"Find a truly original idea. It is the only way I will ever distinguish myself. It is the only way I will ever…matter."

"Classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity."

"I find you very attractive. Your aggressive moves towards me indicates that you feel the same way. However, ritual requires that we engage in a number of platonic activities before we have sex. I am proceeding with those activities when, in point of actual fact, all I really want to do is have intercourse with you as soon as possible. You going to slap me now?"

"There's no point in being nuts if you can't have a little fun."

"[In his Nobel acceptance speech] I've always believed in numbers and the equations and logics that lead to reason. But after a lifetime of such pursuits, I ask: 'What truly is logic?' 'Who decides reason?' My quest has taken me through the physical, the metaphysical, the delusional…and back. And I have made the most important discovery of my career, the most important discovery of my life: It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reasons can be found. [Looking at Alicia] I'm only here tonight because of you. You're the only reason I am…you are all my reasons."

"Perhaps it is good to have a beautiful mind, but an even greater gift is to discover a beautiful heart."

"Helinger: Mathematicians won the war. Mathematicians broke the Japanese codes, and built the A-bomb. Mathematicians … like you. The stated goal of the Soviets is global Communism. In medicine or economics, in technology or space, battle lines are being drawn. To triumph, we need results. Publishable, applicable results. Now, who among you will be the next Morse? The next Einstein? Who among you will be the vanguard of democracy, freedom, and discovery? Today, we bequeath America's future into your able hands. Welcome to Princeton, gentlemen."

"Dr. Rosen: Imagine if you suddenly learned that the people, the places, the moments most important to you were not gone, not dead, but worse, had never been. What kind of hell would that be?"

"Dr. Rosen: [to Alicia] John has schizophrenia, people with this disease are often paranoid."

"Russell Crowe – John Forbes Nash"

"Ed Harris – William Parcher"

"Jennifer Connelly – Alicia Larde Nash"

"Christopher Plummer – Dr. Rosen"

"Paul Bettany – Charles Herman"

"Mislaid. Mislaid among the broken wrists, the chest pains, the scalp lacerations, the man whose fingers were crushed in a taxi door, the infant with a skin rash, the child swiped by a car, the old lady mugged in the subway, the derelict beaten by sailors, the teenage suicide, the paranoids, drunks, asthmatics, the rapes, the septic abortions, the overdosed addicts, the fractures, infarcts, hemorrhages, concussions, boils, abrasions, the colonic cancers, the cardiac arrests - the whole wounded madhouse of our times."

"I am the fool for Christ, and Paraclete of Caborca."

"This is Dr. Ives. He's in the Nephrology Lab. I was in there a little while ago, and he was suddenly taken ill, and I thought I'd better get him over here right away. He had at that time perhaps an hour to live. Prompt treatment would have saved his life. As a staff doctor, he was seen without preliminaries... His vital signs were taken, an electrocardiogram... which revealed occasional ventricular premature contractions. An intern took his history... and then he was promptly... simply... forgotten to death."

"You're a very tired, very damaged man. You've had a hideous marriage, I assume a few tacky affairs along the way. You're understandably reluctant to get involved again. On top of that, here I am with this preposterous idea you throw everything up and go off with me to some barren mountains in Mexico. Utterly mad, I know. On the other hand, you obviously find this world as desolate as I do. You did try to kill yourself last night. So that's it, Herb. Either me and the mountains or - a bottle of potassium."

"Mr. Blacktree disapproves of my miniskirt, the only thing I had to come to the city with. Back at the tribe, I wear ankle-length buckskin."

"Within a week, my father had closed his Beacon Hill practice and set out to start a mission in the Mexican Mountains. I turned in my SDS card and my crash helmet, and I followed him. It was a disaster, at least for me. My father had received the revelation, not I. He stood gaunt on a mountain slope and preached the Apocalypse to solemnly amused Indians. I masturbated a great deal. We lived in a grass wickiup, ate raw rabbit and crushed piñon nuts. It was hideous. Within two months, I was back in Boston. A hollow shell, disenchanted with everything, and dizzy with dengue. I turned to austerity, combed my hair tight, entered nursing school. I became haggard, driven - had shamelessly incestuous dreams about my father. I took up with some of the senior staff there. One of them a portly psychiatrist, explained I was generated by an unresolved lust for my father. I cracked up. One day, they found me walking to work naked and screaming obscenities. There was talk of institutionalizing me. So I packed a bag and went back to join my father in the Sierra Madre Mountains. I've been there ever since. That's three years. My father is, of course, as mad as a hatter. I watch over him, and have been curiously content. You see, Doctor, I believe in everything."

"I'm middle class. Among us middle class, love doesn't triumph over all - responsibility does."

"Josh Lucas – Martin Hansen"

"There has to be a mathematical explanation for how bad your tie is."

"We've got a 23-year-old boy. I threw him out of the house last year. A shaggy-haired Maoist. I don't know where he is. Presumably, building bombs in basements as an expression of universal brotherhood."

"You're greedy, unfeeling, inept, indifferent, self-inflating, and unconscionably profitable. Besides that, I have nothing against you. I'm sure you play a hell of a game of golf."

"Now what in hell am I going to tell this boy Schaefer's parents? That a substitute nurse assassinated him because she couldn't tell the doctors from the patients on the floor? My God! The incompetence in this hospital is absolutely radiant... I mean, where do you train your nurses, Mrs. Christie, Dachau!?"

"It is only in the mysterious equation of love that any logical reasons can be found."

"I need to believe that something extraordinary is possible …"