Atlas Movie Quotes

Sixsmith. I climb the steps of the Scot monument every morning and all becomes clear. Wish I could make you see this brightness. Don't worry, all is well. All is so perfectly, damnably well. I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so. Moments like this, I can feel your heart beating as clearly as I feel my own, and I know that separation is an illusion. My life extends far beyond the limitations of me.

I put it to the great man [Hitchcock], the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that's... the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression. We'll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless unive3rse, but only our toes.

But it was the figure you cut as an employee, on an employee's footing with the girls, in work clothes, and being of that tin-tough, creaking, jazzy bazaar of hardware, glassware, chocolate, chickenfeed, jewelry, drygoods, oilcloth, and song hits--that was the big thing; and even being the Atlases of it, under the floor, hearing how the floor bore up under the ambling weight of hundreds, with the fanning, breathing movie organ next door and the rumble descending from the trolleys on Chicago Avenue--the bloody-rinded Saturday gloom of wind-bourne ash, and blackened forms of five-story buildings rising up to a blind Northern dimness from the Christmas blaze of shops.

Research on emotion shows that positive emotions wear off quickly. Our emotional systems like newness. They like novelty. They like change. We adapt to positive life circumstances so that before too long, the new car, the new spouse, the new house—they don’t feel so new and exciting anymore. But gratitude makes us appreciate the value of something, and when we appreciate the value of something, we extract more benefits from it; we’re less likely to take it for granted. In effect, I think gratitude allows us to participate more in life. We notice the positives more, and that magnifies the pleasures you get from life. Instead of adapting to goodness, we celebrate goodness. We spend so much time watching things—movies, computer screens, sports—but with gratitude we become greater participants in our lives as opposed to spectators.

We understand this well in every other book, movie, or television show—perhaps a little too well. Today’s filmmakers blow up entire populated planets just to raise the stakes for the hero’s climactic fight scene (something done in both the Star Wars and Star Trek science fiction franchises). In “Game of Thrones,” murder and torture are doled out with such abandon, over so many seasons, that they cease to be mere plot devices and become a central theme of the series. But heaven forbid Ayn Rand should write a scene where people suffocate to death to demonstrate the disastrous consequences of Big Government. As with most literary complaints against her, this one is applied selectively, only to the author with an unwelcome political and philosophical message.

If God created the world, how do we know what things we can change and what things must remain sacred and inviolable?

King Kong is many things, but at the bottom it’s a lament for the end of the Age of Exploration. The westerners couldn’t be made until the closing of the West. And King Kong couldn’t be made until technology had domesticated nature. We scour the globe but only find ourselves, and like Alexander the Great, we despair. There are no new lands for us to conquer.

The movie in our mind is wonderful, but no one else knows their parts, their lines, or what it means to us. When the picture or movie fails to play out in real life, we feel disappointed. And sometimes that disappointment is severe and brings shame and hurt and anger with it. It’s a setup for us and for the people involved. Disappointment takes a toll on us and our relationships.

Scar: We’re going to watch Frozen. Are you coming back to our room? My lips parted and utter excitement ran through me. I shoved my Atlas back into my pocket and started running up the stairs, taking them two at a time. He’d finally dropped his walls, he was allowing me to peek into his heart and see the Disney princess living in there. Was it Belle? Aurora? Ariel? Of course it was Ariel. He’d been waiting to get his legs for years and live above the sea. We needed to have another movie night. Maybe he’d wear Mickey Mouse ears if I bought them for him. We could get matching ones for the pride. Different colours for each of us.

Your lack of work is not making me resentful, my lack of rest is making me resentful. I remember the moment I saw resentment in another person and thought "Oh no, she's so unlikable. So awful. But so painfully relatable. I don't want to be that person" Home for the Holidays movie

...a tall, fragile woman with pale blond hair and a face of such beauty that it seemed veiled by distance, as if the artist had been merely able to suggest it, not to make it quite real...she was Kay Ludlow, the movie star who, once seen, could never be forgotten; the star who had retired and vanished five years ago, to be replaced by girls of indistinguishable names and interchangeable faces...she felt that the glass cafeteria was a cleaner use for Kay Ludlow’s beauty than a role in a picture glorifying the commonplace for possessing no glory.

The more you look, the less you see.

The more you look, the less you see.

What expectations do you have going into this? What do you want to happen? Why? What will that mean to you? Do you have a movie in your head? And in this perception-driven world, the big question is always: Are you setting goals and expectations that are completely outside of your control?

Dr. Stadler felt certain that this small-time shyster had had as little to do with the Project as any of the movie-usher attendants, that he possessed neither the mind nor the initiative nor even the sufficient degree of malice to cause a new gopher trap to be brought into the world, that he, too, was only the pawn of a silent machine—a machine that had no center, no leader, no direction, a machine that had not been set in motion by Dr. Ferris or Wesley Mouch, or any of the cowed creatures in the grandstands, or any of the creatures behind the scenes—an impersonal, unthinking, unembodied machine, of which none was the driver and all were the pawns, each to the degree of his evil. Dr. Stadler gripped the edge of the bench: he felt a desire to leap to his feet and run.

Isn’t it odd? When a politician or a movie star retires, we read front page stories about it. But when a philosopher retires, people do not even notice it.” “They do, eventually.