Eva Movie Quotes

I stopped examining myself in the mirror to compare myself to the perfect beauties of movies and magazines; I decided I was beautiful-- for the simple reason that I wanted to be. And then never gave the matter a second thought. -Eva Luna

When my turn on the program comes, I am not nervous at all—because all this is happening out of time, out of space. I am, for a moment, a figure of my own fantasy, and I play my appointed role as if I were in the movies.

Don’t you fall for the big hearts and flowers, acting like it’s the movies. Bunch of bullshit, he said. Pardon me. You want the guy who’ll get your medicine in the middle of the night, even in a blizzard, even after twenty years. You want the guy who shows you every day, shoveling the walk, carrying your groceries, shows you how much he loves you. It’s not about talking the talk, Eva. You must have met my father, I said.

Blonde movie stars in the 1950s seem to have been pretty much divided between breathy bombshells (Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield) and slim, elegant swans (Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint). Producers didn’t really know what to do with Judy Holliday, a brilliant, versatile actress who simply didn’t fit into any easy category. Though she left behind a handful of delightful films, one can’t help feeling a sense of waste that her gifts were not better handled by Hollywood (or, for that matter, by Broadway). Perhaps, like Lucille Ball, Judy Holliday would have blossomed with a really good sitcom; but, unlike Lucy, she never got one.

You know those horror movies where the silicon-inflated babe totters down the street in stilettos while a werewolf lopes after her at six thousand miles an hour? All I have to say to that is, “Bitch would have gotten away if she’d picked better shoes.

Yeah, he said, you'll know he's the one because when he says he'll do anything for you, he means it. Don't you fall for the big hearts and flowers, acting like it's the movies. Bunch of bullshit, he said. Pardon me. You want the guy who'll get your medicine in the middle of the night, even in a blizzard, even after twenty years. You want the guy who shows you every day, shoveling the walk, carrying your groceries, shows you how much he loves you. It's not about talking the talk, Eva.

It is difficult to grasp the appeal of watching humans that don’t exist struggle with problems that aren’t real.” He watched the on-screen couple regard each other warily from across a crowded room. “I have observed many real humans with real problems. I don’t see the need to invent new ones for entertainment.” “Maybe it’s so we can dissociate from our own for a while.” Eva grabbed a handful of popcorn and consumed it with relish. “Their issues could be solved in one conversation. Why are they incapable of basic communication?” She laughed, though it ended with another wince. “You just summarized half the romance genre in two sentences. Though to be fair, this movie is especially bad.

In the front seats, Eva and Petya argued over the ending of an Australian horror movie. Eva was winning, speaking with more conviction; Petya kept falling silent as he navigated around potholes in the road. The next time he downshifted, Eva turned in her seat to make her case to Marina. “The end of it is a fantasy, like a dream sequence, don’t you agree?” “I didn’t see the movie,” Marina said. Eva pursed her lips. “From what you heard us describe, though. Doesn’t it seem most likely that it’s a fantasy?” Marina shook her head. “I don’t know.” That familiar pressure began to come down on her chest. Petya, bringing the car back up to speed, glanced at his wife. “She hasn’t seen it. Leave her alone.

Do you remember that movie we saw when we were little?” I begin. “The Great Escape—we watched it with Dad at least seven or eight times. It was about these American pilots in a German POW camp who dig this long, long tunnel that runs the length of the compound. But, on the night of the escape, when they reach the end of the tunnel, they realize they’re six meters short of the forest. Their calculations had been off by six meters! They’ve got no choice but to risk their necks and make a run for it, in plain view of the guards. Do you remember?” “No,” she says indifferently. “Whatever. What I’m trying to say is: Being with a woman is like sticking your head out of the tunnel and discovering that you’ve actually dug through those last few meters.

Well, that seemed to be par for the course for me these days. Taking on the Impossible: The Serenity Drake story. Who would I want to play me in the movie version?

It could have been a love story made for the movie screens, but then so was our tragedy.

It was a slice of life Eva thought only existed in movies, this idea that everything could be so perfect—the grass, the sun, the players in their crisp white uniforms, hitting home runs over the fence and into San Francisco Bay, where a cluster of people with baseball gloves in kayaks waited to catch one of them.

You okay, Vi? I heard you scream. Vi?” Patience knocks again. “I’m fine. Just watching a movie.” Just coming down from an orgasm that has an earthquake rattling me to the core.

Don’t you fall for the big hearts and flowers, acting like it’s the movies. Bunch of bullshit, he said. Pardon me. You want the guy who’ll get your medicine in the middle of the night, even in a blizzard, even after twenty years. You want the guy who shows you every day, shoveling the walk, carrying your groceries, shows you how much he loves you. It’s not about talking the talk, Eva. You

There was a part of me that was storing this up, trying to make a movie of my memories, and for what? I was trying to sear this vision into my memory because I thought this might be the last time I'd ever see it.

The Things They Carried has sold over two million copies internationally, won numerous awards, and is an English classroom staple. Isabel Allende was the first writer to hold me inside a sentence, rapt and wondrous. It's no surprise that her most transformative writing springs from personal anguish. Her first book, The House of the Spirits, began as a letter to her dying grandfather whom she could not reach in time. Eva Luna, one of my favorite novels, is about an orphan girl who uses her storytelling gift to survive and thrive amid trauma, and Allende refers to the healing power of writing in many of her interviews. Allende's books have sold over fifty-six million copies, been translated into thirty languages, and been made into successful plays and movies. Such is the power of mining your deep. Jeanette Winterson acknowledges that her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is her own story of growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian household in the 1950s. She wrote it to create psychic space from the trauma. In her memoir, she writes of Oranges, “I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.” Sherman Alexie, who grew up in poverty on an Indian reservation that as a child he never dreamed he could leave, does something similar in his young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, named one of the “Best Books of 2007” by School Library Journal. He has said that fictionalizing life is so satisfying because he can spin the story better than real life did. Nora Ephron's roman à clef Heartburn is a sharply funny, fictionalized account of Ephron's own marriage to Carl Bernstein. She couldn't control his cheating during her pregnancy or the subsequent dissolution of their marriage, but through the novelization of her experience, she got to revise the ending of that particular story. In Heartburn, Rachel, the character based on Ephron, is asked

He brings out everything I’ve denied since the first time I got turned on watching a slasher movie.

But this isn’t what I had in mind when I googled primal kinks and told the devil that the most intense orgasm I ever had was when I touched myself watching a horror movie.

Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people’s lives, the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined to us; the feverish waiting for a phone call or an email, the thrill that runs our spine at the mere thought of him or her. To be in love is to become an adept of Plato, to see through a person an Idea, perfect and complete.2 Endless novels, poems, or movies teach us the art of becoming Plato’s disciples, loving the perfection manifested by the beloved. Yet, a culture that has so much to say about love is far more silent on the no-less-mysterious moment when we avoid falling in love, where we fall out of love, when the one who kept us awake at night now leaves us indifferent, when we hurry away from those who excited us a few months or even a few hours ago. This silence is all the more puzzling as the number of relationships that dissolve soon after their beginning or at some point down along their emotional line is staggering.Perhaps our culture does not know how to represent or think about this because we live in and through stories and dramas, and “unloving” is not a plot with a clear structure. More often than not it does not start with an inaugural moment, a revelation. On the contrary, some relationships fade or evaporate before or soon after they properly started, while others end with slow and incomprehensible death.