[after reading a letter sent by his mother]
Alexander:
It's a high ransom she charges for nine months lodging in the womb.
Hephaistion:
Bring her to Babylon, Alexander. It'll give her such joy.
Alexander:
Joy! I am the cracked mirror of her dreams... Stay with me tonight Hephaistion.
Hephaistion:
What bothers you?
Alexander:
I see in her everything I fear. Yet I have no idea what it is; this fear. She was always so sure I was born of Zeus. Why, Hephaistion?
Hephaistion:
I think there are things beyond our imagining. Like the lightening. Tales of strange conceptions. I don't doubt it.
Alexander:
What is being told me? What destiny do I have?
Hephaistion:
Well, if I'm Patroclus, I die first. Then you, Achilles. The generals are upset. They question your obsession with Darius. They say it was never meant for you to be king of Asia.
Alexander:
Naturally. They want only to return to their homes rich with gold, but I have seen the future, Hephaistion! I've seen it now a thousand times, on a thousand faces. These people want, need, change. Aristotle was wrong about them.
Hephaistion:
How so?
Alexander:
Look at those we've conquered. They leave their dead unburied, they smash their enemies skulls and drink them as dust, they mate in public! How can they think, or sing, or write when none can read? But as Alexander's army they could go where they never thought possible. They can soldier, or work in the cities. From the Alexandrias, from Egypt to the outer ocean. We could connect these lands, Hephaistion. And the people.
Hephaistion:
Some say these Alexandrias have become extensions of Alexander himself. They draw people into the cities so as to make slaves.
Alexander:
But we've freed them, Hephaistion, from the Persias, where everyone lived as slaves! To free the people of the world! Such would be beyond the glory of Achilles. Beyond Heracles! A feat to rival Prometheus, who was always a friend to man.
Hephaistion:
Remember the fates of these heroes. They suffered, greatly.
Alexander:
We all suffer. Your father, mine. They all came to the end of their time and in the end, when it's over, all that matters is what you've done.
Hephaistion:
You once said the fear of death drives all men. Are there no other forces? Is there not love in your life, Alexander? What would you do if you ever reached the end of the world? I wonder sometimes, if it's not your mother you run from, so many years, so many miles between you, what is it you fear?
Alexander:
Who knows these things? When I was a child my mother thought me divine; my father, weak. Which am I, Hephaistion? Weak or divine? All I know is I trust only you in this world. I've missed you. I need you. It is you I love, Hephaistion. No other.
Hephaistion:
You still hold you head cocked like that.
Alexander:
[laughing] I have to stop that.
Hephaistion:
No, like a dear listening in the wind you strike me still, Alexander. You have eyes like no other. I sound as stupid as a school boy, but you're everything I care for. And by the sweet breath of Aphrodite I'm so jealous of losing you to this world you want so badly.
Alexander:
You'll never lose me, Hephaistion. I'll be with you always. 'Til the end.
[at a seminar, Charlie Kaufman has asked McKee for advice on his new screenplay in which 'nothing much happens']
Robert McKee:
Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There's genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ's sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know crap about life! And why the FUCK are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don't have any use for it! I don't have any bloody use for it!
Charlie Kaufman:
Okay, thanks.
Ebenezer Scrooge:
[in the graveyard] Must we return to this place? There is something else that I must know, is that not true? Spirit, I know what I must ask. I fear to, but I must. Who was the wretched man whose death brought so much glee and happiness to others? [the spirit points to a headstone, Scrooge begins moving toward it, then turns back, frightened]
Ebenezer Scrooge:
Answer me one more question. Are these the shadows of things that *will* be, or are they the shadows of things that *may* be only? [the spirit points again at the gravestone, Scrooge slowly approaches it]
Ebenezer Scrooge:
These events can be changed! A life can be made right. [he clears the snow from the stone and reads]
Ebenezer Scrooge:
[in tears] Ebenezer Scrooge! Oh please Spirit, no! Hear me, I, I am not the man I was! Why would you show me this if I am past all hope?... [sobbing]
Ebenezer Scrooge:
I, I *will* honor Christmas, and try to keep it all the year! I will live my life in the past, the present and the future. I will not shut out the lessons the spirits have taught me! Tell me that I may sponge out the writing on this stone! [kneeling, clutching at the spirit's robe]
Ebenezer Scrooge:
Oh Spirit, please speak to me!
To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles? To die, to sleep, no more! and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is air to. 'Tis a consummation devoutely to be wished. To die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream; Aye there's the rub that makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised love, the laws delay, the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes. When he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin? For who would Fardels bare to grunt and sweat under a dreary life. But that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose born, no traveller returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have then fly to others that we know not of. Thus conscious does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sickeled o'er with the pale cast of thought. And enterprises of great pith and moment, with this regard, their current turn ary, and lose the name of action. Soft you now thy fair Ophelia, Nymph in thy orisions. Be all my sins remembered
When Great Trees Fall
Maya Angelou
When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.
When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.
Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.
And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.
Will Turner:
Barbossa, you lying bastard! You swore she'd go free!
Barbossa:
Don't dare impugn me honor boy! I agreed she go free, but it was you who failed to specify when or where. Though it does seem a shame to lose somethin' so fine, don't it, lads?
The Crew:
Aye.
Barbossa:
So I'll be havin' that dress back before ye go.
Jack Sparrow:
I always liked you.
Bo'sun:
Grr...
Elizabeth:
Goes with your black heart.
Barbossa:
Ooh, it's still warm.
The Crew:
Off you go!; Come on!; Get on with it!
Bo'sun:
Too long!
Jack Sparrow:
I really rather hope we were past all this.
Barbossa:
Jack... Jack! Did you not notice? That be the same island we made you the governor of on our last little trip.
Jack Sparrow:
I did notice.
Barbossa:
Perhaps, you'll conjure up another miraculous escape, but I doubt it. Off you go.
Jack Sparrow:
The last time you left me a pistol with one shot.
Barbossa:
By the powers, you're right. Where be Jack's pistol? Bring it forward.
Jack Sparrow:
Seeing as there's two of us, a gentleman would give us a pair of pistols.
Barbossa:
It'll be one pistol as before, and you can be the gentleman and shoot the lady; and starve to death yourself.
Jesse:
I know what you mean about wishing somebody wasn't there, though. It's just usually it's myself that I wish I could get away from. Seriously, think about this. I have never been anywhere that I haven't been. I've never had a kiss when I wasn't one of the kissers. Y'know, I've never, um, gone to the movies, when I wasn't there in the audience. I've never been out bowling, if I wasn't there, y'know making some stupid joke. I think that's why so many people hate themselves. Seriously, it's just they are sick to death of being around themselves.
Jesse:
Let's say that you and I were together all the time, then you'd start to hate a lot of my mannerisms. The way every time we would have people over, uh, I'd be insecure, and I'd get a little too drunk. Or, uh, the way I'd tell the same stupid pseudo-intellectual story again, and again. Y'see, I've heard all those stories. So of course I'm sick of myself. But being with you, uh, it's made me feel like I'm somebody else.
The Coroner:
On gross pathology, we have a female Caucasian between sixteen and thirty. The cadaver is presented in two halves with bisection level with the umbilicus. Through and through lacerations of both mouth corners. No visible bruising on the neck. Rectangular abrasions on the wing tips of the sphenoid bones. And, oh! A puncture wound, here, in the palm. On the palm of the right hand. Investigation of upper half abdominal cavity reveals no free-flowing blood. Intestines, stomach, spleen, liver - all removed.
Russ Millard:
Is it all right to smoke, doctor?
The Coroner:
She won't mind. Lower half of cadaver reveals removal of all reproductive organs. Both legs broken at the knee. Questions?
Russ Millard:
What's your best guess?
The Coroner:
Well, here's what she wasn't - she wasn't raped and she wasn't pregnant. In terms of the nitty gritty, the cause of death is either the mouth wound here or she was beaten to death with something like a baseball bat.
Lee Blanchard:
What about her insides?
The Coroner:
They came out posthumously. I'd say then he drained the blood from the body and washed it clean, probably in a bathtub.
[Ethel Rosenberg walks into the room]
Roy Cohn:
Aw, fuck. Ethel.
Ethel Rosenberg:
You don't look so good, Roy.
Roy Cohn:
Well, Ethel. I don't feel so good.
Ethel Rosenberg:
But you lost a lot of weight. That suits you. You were heavy back then. Zaftig, mit hips.
Roy Cohn:
I haven't been that heavy since 1960. We were all heavier back then, before the body thing started. Now I look like a skeleton they stare at.
Ethel Rosenberg:
The shit's really hit the fan, huh, Roy? The fun's just started.
Roy Cohn:
What is this Ethel, Halloween? You trying to scare me? Well you're wasting your time 'cause I'm scarier than you are any day of the week! So beat it, Ethel! Boo! Better dead than red! Somebody trying to shake me up? Hm, hm? From the throne of God in heaven to the belly of hell, you can all fuck yourselves and then go jump in the lake because I am not afraid of you or death or hell or anything!
Ethel Rosenberg:
I'll be seeing you soon, Roy. Julius sends his regards.
Roy Cohn:
Yeah, well send this to Julius! [Roy flips her the bird]
Ethel Rosenberg:
You really are a very sick man, Roy.