Abbey Movie Quotes

People talk about confidence without ever bringing up hard work. That’s a mistake. I know I sound like some dour older spinster on Downton Abbey who has never felt a man’s touch and whose heart has turned to stone, but I don’t understand how you could have self-confidence if you don’t do the work... I have never, ever, ever, met a high confident person and successful person who is not what a movie would call a 'workaholic.' Because confidence is like respect; you have to earn it.

We talked for a while about the difficulty he and others had had trying to make a movie of The Monkey Wrench Gang. Part of the difficulty was that while Hollywood is fine with violence toward people and cars and buildings, they don’t want to make a movie where the principal and intended victims are private or industrial property. Peacock cursed the various producers and directors. He had written several drafts of scripts for the movie and even had one in his room at that moment. The movie had almost been made a dozen times, with actors from Jack Nicholson to Matthew McConaughey cast as Hayduke.

That pesky movie version was the culprit. Sure, Jane had first read Pride and Prejudice when she was sixteen, read it a dozen times since, and read the other Austen novels at least twice, except Northanger Abbey (of course).

The rain had shifted sideways, forcing me to use the umbrella like the bulletproof James Bond version. Doing so exposed my face, and that was all man with the donkey needed. In a split second from fifty feet away, he recognized me like an old pal from his childhood. As soon as we made eye contact, my arcane watcher called out in an accent as thick as the downpour, “Hey man—the new guy sucks!” If my jaw wasn’t attached it would still be on the ground in that hallowed courtyard. We traded a slow-motion thumbs-up as I sloshed past my new favorite person and his trusty burro, into the shelter of the sacred abbey. Knowing exactly who he’d been referring to made the moment that much more surreal. In frikkin’ Colombia—on a tip from the local dope man, at the oldest church on the continent, in a monsoon at the top of a mountain—guy in mud with donkey stood in solidarity rejecting the guy who replaced me on Two and a Half Men. If that scene was in a movie, the screen would be pelted with bonbons and shoes. The illogical probability of our encounter doesn’t exist in any realm I have the ability to access. I’ll leave the quantum math to the experts—sometimes it rains, and sometimes you get stuck in that rain with people you’d never otherwise meet.