Earnest Movie Quotes

Good heavens, I suppose a man may eat his own muffins in his own garden." "But you have just said it was perfectly heartless to eat muffins!" "I said it was perfectly heartless of YOU under the circumstances. That is a very different thing." "That may be, but the muffins are the same!

My whole life I though I was the star of an overly earnest romance movie, and it turns out I was in a goddamned buddy comedy all along.

Keep your life simple and stylish and earnest. Do good and donate your time and money to something you care about. Make people laugh. Be frank. Always give people a second chance—but rarely a third. Live light, travel light, and be light. Forget shit and move on. Make everyone you love feel loved. Waste not, want not. Reuse stuff. Stop trying to get a tan and straighten your hair—you’re just not made that way. Go to the movies, go to the library, go to the park. Try to make every day feel as close to a vacation as possible. Floss.

My whole life I thought I was the star of an overly earnest romance movie, and it turns out I was in a goddamned buddy comedy all along.

About my interests: I don’t know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified. Otherwise, I love to eat and drink – it’s my melancholy conviction that I’ve scarcely ever had enough to eat (this is because it’s impossible to eat enough if you’re worried about the next meal) – and I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to laugh. I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything. I don’t like people who like me because I’m a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.

Kaitlin said, "I'm so sick of that 'Greatest Generation' crap. We finally drove a silver nail through the heart of Generation X, only to have this new monster rear its head. And I'm soooooo sick of Tom Hanks looking earnest all the time. They should make a Tom Hanks movie where Tom kills off Greatest Generation figureheads one by one." Bree arrived on cue: "And then he starts killing other generations. He becomes this supernova of hate--all he wants to do is destroy." "Hate clings to him like a rich, lathery shampoo. His lungs secrete it like anthrax foam." Mom lost it. "Stop it! All of you! Tom Hanks is a fine actor who would never hurt anybody. At least not onscreen." I thought, 'Hey, didn't Tom Hanks mow down half of Chicago in "Road to Perdition?"' Well, whatever.

Are these black cats like the hare?" "No. They're smaller; they only want me to play with them. Fly away with them to a place on the other side of the moon. There's a garden there, all silvery-gold, and the cats and hares dance and jump round and round. They can jump so much farther than they can on earth; it's like flying, and they love it so. Sometimes I've felt as if I'd like to dance and jump through the air too, they looked so happy, and I've thought maybe if I did I wouldn't be afraid any more, but when I look they're all dancing round a Figure that sits still in the middle of the garden. A big black Figure with a hood on. And It hasn't got any face. Its face is so awful that It keeps it covered. And then I get so terribly afraid. And everything stops." "And you see all that in the picture?" "I don't know." She hesitated again. "I think it's partly dreams. After I've thought they were at the windows - the cats and the big hare. They sit there and watch, you see, after I've gone to sleep. But they don't come often. I don't usually know what's there." She came closer and whispered, her blue eyes earnest and weird, "I don't think it's an animal hare. I think it's Aunt Sarai's hare, that maybe it came from hell. It isn't swearing to say that word just as the name of a place, is it? That's why people used to be so scared of witches' black cats, isn't it, because they thought they weren't earth-cats, they were from the devil? Mother says there isn't any hell or any witches. But Aunt Sarai was a witch; that's why she can come back. I think they've all been witches here; the house is mad because mother wouldn't be; that's why it wants me now." Carew said, "It was all dreams, Betty. There is no hell. There is no garden on the other side of the moon. It's a dead world, full of volcanic craters, with no air for anything to grow in or breathe. A hare frightened you and, being nervous, you've had nightmares about it - pictures that fear paints on your mind just as an artist would on canvas, with paints and brushes. "Every dream is now a movie we make for ourselves in our sleep...

I’m still adjusting my mind to all the earnest God talk I’m hearing at Liberty. From time to time, it still feels like I walked onto the set of a Lifetime movie. But one thing has become clear: these Liberty students have no ulterior motive. They simply can’t contain their love for God. They’re happy to be believers, and they’re telling the world.

Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out. In short, he was a dope. He often looked to Yossarian like one of those people hanging around modern museums with both eyes together on one side of a face. It was an illusion, of course, generated by Clevinger’s predilection for staring fixedly at one side of a question and never seeing the other side at all. Politically, he was a humanitarian who did know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope. He was a very serious, very earnest and very conscientious dope. It was impossible to go to a movie with him without getting involved afterwards in a discussion on empathy, Aristotle, universals, messages and the obligations of the cinema as an art form in a materialistic society. Girls he took to the theater had to wait until the first intermission to find out from him whether or not they were seeing a good or a bad play, and then found out at once. He was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing faint in its presence. He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

Do you believe in love at first sight?” He made himself look at her face, at her wide-open eyes and earnest forehead. At her unbearably sweet mouth. “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you believe in love before that?” Her breath caught in her throat like a sore hiccup. And then it was too much to keep trying not to kiss her. She came readily into his arms. Lincoln leaned against the coffee machine and pulled her onto him completely. There it was again, that impossible to describe kiss. This is how 2011 should have ended, he thought. This is infinity. The first time Beth pulled away, he pulled her back. The second time, he bit her lip. Then her neck. Then the collar of her shirt. “I don’t know…,” she said, sitting up in his lap, laying her check on the top of his head. “I don’t know what you meant by love before love at first sight.” Lincoln pushed his face into her shoulder and tried to think of a good way to answer. “Just that… I knew how I felt about you before I ever saw you,” he said, “when I still thought I might never see you…” She held his head in her hands and titled it back, so she could see his face. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. Which made him laugh. “Absolutely,” he said. “No, I mean it,” Beth said. “Men fall in love with their eyes.” He closed his. “That’s practically science,” she said. “Maybe,” Lincoln said. Her fingers felt so good in his hair. “But I couldn’t see you, so…” “So, what did you see?” “Just…the sort of girl who would write the sort of things that you wrote.” “What things?” Lincoln opened his eyes. Beth was studying his face. She looked skeptical-maybe about more than just the last thing he said. This was important, he realized. “Everything,” he said, sitting straighter, keeping hold of her waist. “Everything you wrote about your work, about your boyfriend…The way you comforted Jennifer and made her laugh, through the baby and after. I pictured a girl who could be kind, and that kind of funny. I pictured a girl who was that alive…” She looked guarded. Lincoln couldn’t tell from her eyes whether he was pushing her away or winning her over. “A girl who never got tired of her favourite movies,” he said softly. “Who saved dresses like ticket stubs. Who could get high on the weather.. “I pictured a girl who made every moment, everything she touched, and everyone around her feel lighter and sweeter. I pictured you,” he said. “I just didn’t know what you looked like. And then, when I did know what you looked like, you looked like the girl who was all those things. You looked like the girl I loved.” Beth’s fingers trembled in his hair, and her forehead dropped against his. A heavy, wet tear fell onto Lincoln’s lips, and he licked it. He pulled her close, as close as he could. Like he didn’t care for the moment whether she could breath. Like there were two of them and only one parachute. “Beth,” he barely said, pressing his face against hers until their lashes brushed, pressing his hand into the small of her back. “I don’t think I can explain it. I don’t think I can make any more sense. But I’ll keep trying. If you want me to.” She almost shook her head. “No,” she said, “no more explaining. Or apologizing. I don’t think it matters how we ended up here. I just…I want to stay…I want.. He kissed her then. There. In the middle of the sentence.

In short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out. In short, he was a dope. He often looked to Yossarian like one of those people hanging around modern museums with both eyes together on one side of a face. It was an illusion, of course, generated by Clevinger’s predilection for staring fixedly at one side of a question and never seeing the other side at all. Politically, he was a humanitarian who did know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope. He was a very serious, very earnest and very conscientious dope. It was impossible to go to a movie with him without getting involved afterward in a discussion on empathy, Aristotle, universals, messages and the obligations of the cinema as an art form in a materialistic society. Girls he took to the theater had to wait until the first intermission to find out from him whether or not they were seeing a good or a bad play, and then found out at once. He was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing faint in its presence. He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it. Yossarian

Everything is going to be alright" we often say to ourselves or to others - when we are faced with problems, before falling asleep, after we have been disappointed. "Things may be unpleasant and difficult at the moment, but in the end everything is going to be alright." As far as the animals are concerned, nothing is going to be alright! Everything is bad, getting worse and the end will be more terrible than all fearful anticipations: on the death transport, on the slaughterhouse floor, on the chair of torture. "Everything is going to be alright!" This pacifying phrase for human beings is not valid for animals, because we have transformed their world into a singular hell. What we invented in horror movies or psychological thrillers to send pleasant shivers down our spine, is what animals are subjected to in reality: everywhere, continuously, in our midst, at this very moment - right now. Everybody knows, everybody remains silent, nobody takes action. Can it go on like this? It must not go on like this! Anyone who feels bound in earnest by any moral principles at all has the absolute duty to stand up against these crimes, which are in utter contradiction to every kind of morality.

Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out. In short, he was a dope. He often looked to Yossarian like one of those people hanging around modern museums with both eyes together on one side of a face. It was an illusion, of course, generated by Clevinger’s predilection for staring fixedly at one side of a question and never seeing the other side at all. Politically, he was a humanitarian who did know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope. He was a very serious, very earnest and very conscientious dope. It was impossible to go to a movie with him without getting involved afterwards in a discussion on empathy, Aristotle, universals, messages and the obligations of the cinema as an art form in a materialistic society. Girls he took to the theater had to wait until the first intermission to find out from him whether or not they were seeing a good or a bad play, and then found out at once. He was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing faint in its presence. He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it. Yossarian tried to help him. ‘Don’t be a dope,’ he had counseled Clevinger when they were both at cadet school in Santa Ana, California.

Perhaps to be human is to struggle one’s whole life to find some solid ground to stand on and then die never coming anywhere close. And perhaps that’s not even a bad thing. To know the true meaning of life and self is to do what with it? End the mystery? End the game? What then? Perhaps one day we will find some unifying theory of everything and perhaps somehow this will make everything better, but what are the odds that we still care about the point of life after we’ve found it? Imagine a movie in which you knew exactly why and what everything was from the start. Imagine a life, if we found a theory of everything or an equation that connected the mysteries of quantum mechanics and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, and we understood the very core of how and why the universe worked, what difference would this really make in terms of the meaning of life. Would two different people still not watch the same movie and experience and interpret two different things? We would of course all agree that it’s a movie and on how the movie works, but when it comes to meaning, there will always remain a perceptual layer completely relative to the individuals observing it. Because of this, if we found the overarching ultimate truth of existence tomorrow, half the world would not believe it, and the other half would fight for it. And as a whole, we would be no different. And if somehow the whole world did agree upon one truth, what then? Utopia? What then? The truth we seek when considering the quality and meaning of our lives is not an outward truth, not a truth that resolves the questions of the universe, but a truth that glimpses inward and assembles into a stable self that can be integrated seamlessly into our perception of the whole around us, a truth we can’t ever truly have. Truth is not even the right word here, there is no right word here. That’s the point. I sit here writing, thinking about my being, about the strange relationship I have with this life and this plane of existence. I think about how alive I feel right now while writing. How potent this moment is. How insane and beautiful it is. How important it has been to me in the past. Thinking, writing, talking, and reading about earnest experiences and attempts at living. Personally, the direct confrontation with the challenges, complexities, sufferings, and plights of the human condition have provided me with some of, if not all of the profound, potent, and beautiful moments of my life. And I wonder if I would have ever experienced any of those undeniably worthy moments if life made sense. If it didn’t hurt and overwhelm me… How beautiful would the night sky be if we knew exactly where it went and how the stars got there? Would we ever be inspired to create art and form interpretations out of this life, what would I have written about? What would I have read about? How would I have ever found love or friendship or connection with others? Why would I have ever laughed or cried? What would I be doing right now? Would there be anything to say? Anything to live or die for? I don’t feel that my life would have been any better if I had known any more of what it was all about, in fact I think it would have only worsened the whole thing, we seem to so desire certainty, and immortality, a utopic end of conflict, suffering, and misunderstanding, and yet in the final elimination of all darkness exists light with no contrast. And where there is no contrast of light there is no perception of light, at all. What we think we want is rarely what we do, if we ever got what we did, we would no longer have anything. What we really want is to want. To have something to ceaselessly chase and move towards. To feel the motion and synchronicity with the universe's unending forward movement.

The Bible’s was an unlikely, movie-set world alongside our world. Light-shot and translucent in the pallid Sunday-school watercolors on the walls, stormy and opaque in the dense and staggering texts they read us placidly, sweet-mouthed and earnest, week after week, this world interleaved our waking world like dream. The

The Bible’s was an unlikely, movie-set world alongside our world. Light-shot and translucent in the pallid Sunday-school watercolors on the walls, stormy and opaque in the dense and staggering texts they read us placidly, sweet-mouthed and earnest, week after week, this world interleaved our waking world like dream.

Did you ever bring girls back here?” I ask, broaching dangerous territory. I’m thinking dangerous thoughts. Having dangerous fantasies. Wanting dangerous things. “Never,” he says earnestly. “Yeah, I don’t believe you.” I cross over to his DVD case by the door, pretending to be curious about what he liked to watch when he was a teenager—and I am—but really, I just need to have some space from him before I let this crazy twitterpated feeling get the best of me. But Chase follows me. “I’m dead serious. Pop has a shotgun. He was always threatening to shoot my dick off if I knocked a girl up. Scared the shit out of me.” I laugh nervously, keeping my eyes on the movies. “And here you are trying to knock a girl up now. You must have gotten over your fear.” “Pop has arthritis. He’d have too much trouble loading the gun.” There’s a soft thud of a door closing, and I look up to see that he has shut us in. “And I have always regretted the lack of action this room has seen.

[On D. W. Griffith] Even in Griffith’s best work there is enough that is poor, or foolish, or merely old-fashioned, so that one has to understand, if by no means forgive, those who laugh indiscriminately at his good work and his bad. (With all that “understanding,” I look forward to killing, some day, some specially happy giggler at the exquisite scene in which the veteran comes home, in The Birth of a Nation) But even his poorest work was never just bad. Whatever may be wrong with it, there is in every instant, so well as I can remember, the unique purity and vitality of birth or of a creature just born and first exerting its unprecedented, incredible strength; and there are, besides, Griffith’s overwhelming innocence and magnanimity of spirit; his moral and poetic earnestness; his joy in his work; and his splendid intuitiveness, directness, common sense, daring, and skill as an inventor and as an artist. Aside from his talent or genius as an inventor and artist, he was all heart; and ruinous as his excesses sometimes were in that respect, they were inseparable from his virtues, and small beside them. He was remarkably good, as a rule, in the whole middle range of feeling, but he was at his best just short of his excesses, and he tended in general to work out toward the dangerous edge. He was capable of realism that has never been beaten and he might, if he had been able to appreciate his powers as a realist, have found therein his growth and salvation. But he seems to have been a realist only by accident, hit-and-run; essentially, he was a poet. He doesn’t appear ever to have realized one of the richest promises that movies hold, as the perfect medium for realism raised to the level of high poetry; nor, oddly enough, was he much of a dramatic poet. But in epic and lyrical and narrative visual poetry, I can think of nobody who has surpassed him, and of few to compare with him. And as a primitive tribal poet, combining something of the bard and the seer, he is beyond even Dovshenko, and no others of their kind have worked in movies.

You need to be careful to stay out of Charlie’s line of sight,” Steve said to me. “I want Charlie focusing only on me. If he changes focus and starts attacking you, it’s going to be too difficult for me to control the situation.” Right. Steve got no argument from me. Getting anywhere near those bone-crushing jaws was the furthest thing from my mind. I wasn’t keen on being down on the water with a huge saltwater crocodile trying to get me. I would have to totally rely on Steve to keep me safe. We stepped into the dinghy, which was moored in Charlie’s enclosure, secured front and back with ropes. Charlie came over immediately to investigate. It didn’t take much to encourage him to have a go at Steve. Steve grabbed a top-jaw rope. He worked on roping Charlie while the cameras rolled. Time and time again, Charlie hurled himself straight at Steve, a half ton of reptile flesh exploding up out of the water a few feet away from me. I tried to hang on precariously and keep the boat counterbalanced. I didn’t want Steve to lose his footing and topple in. Charlie was one angry crocodile. He would have loved nothing more than to get his teeth into Steve. As Charlie used his powerful tail to propel himself out of the water, he arched his neck and opened his jaws wide, whipping his head back and forth, snapping and gnashing. Steve carefully threw the top-jaw rope, but he didn’t actually want to snag Charlie. Then he would have had to get the rope off without stressing the croc, and that would have been tricky. The cameras rolled. Charlie lunged. I cowered. Steve continued to deftly toss the rope. Then, all of a sudden, Charlie swung at the rope instead of Steve, and the rope went right over Charlie’s top jaw. A perfect toss, provided that had been what Steve was trying to do. But it wasn’t. We had a roped croc on our hands that we really didn’t want. Steve immediately let the rope go slack. Charlie had it snagged in his teeth. Because of Steve’s quick thinking and prompt maneuvering, the rope came clear. We breathed a collective sigh of relief. Steve looked up at the cameras. “I think you’ve got it.” John agreed. “I think we do, mate.” The crew cheered. The shoot lasted several minutes, but in the boat, I wasn’t sure if it had been seconds or hours. Watching Steve work Charlie up close had been amazing--a huge, unpredictable animal with a complicated thought process, able to outwit its prey, an animal that had been on the planet for millions of years, yet Steve knew how to manipulate him and got some fantastic footage. To the applause of the crew, Steve got us both out of the boat. He gave me a big hug. He was happy. This was what he loved best, being able to interact and work with wildlife. Never before had anything like it been filmed in any format, much less on thirty-five-millimeter film for a movie theater. We accomplished the shot with the insurance underwriters none the wiser. Steve wanted to portray crocs as the powerful apex predators that they were, keeping everyone safe while he did it. Never once did he want it to appear as though he were dominating the crocodile, or showing off by being in close proximity to it. He wished for the crocodile to be the star of the show, not himself. I was proud of him that day. The shoot represented Steve Irwin at his best, his true colors, and his desire to make people understand how amazing these animals are, to be witnessed by audiences in movie theaters all over the world. We filmed many more sequences with crocs, and each time Steve performed professionally and perfected the shots. He was definitely in his element. With the live-croc footage behind us, the insurance people came on board, and we were finally able to sign a contract with MGM. We were to start filming in earnest. First stop: the Simpson Desert, with perentie lizards and fierce snakes.

The unindividualized, shifting mass of everyone else would be a screen, distributed throughout the city, onto which he'd project the movie of his uninterrupted imagination. Because he'd appear to, and be able to pretend he was\, but never actually be a part of the mass, maybe he'd begin to feel a kind of needless intimacy, not unlike being in the same room as a significant other and feeling affection without touching or speaking. An earnest assembling of the backup life he'd sketched and constructed the blueprints and substructures (during the average of six weeks per year, spread throughout his life, that he'd been in Taiwan) would begin, at some point, after which, months and years later, one morning, he would sense the independent organization of a second, itinerant consciousness—lured here by the new, unoccupied structures—toward which he'd begin sending the data of his sensory perception.