Fortress Movie Quotes

Our inner dialogue is frequently composed of old tape loops that we run again and again... The normal personality marshals sufficient defense mechanisms to exclude dangerous and unknown stimuli and just enough windows to let in an occasional wandering minstrel. Neurotic identity crises come when our defense mechanisms have been too successful and we're encapsulated in the fortress we have constructed with nothing to refresh us in our solitary confinement. So we play the old movies with their stale fears and their unrealistic hopes until we become bored enough to risk disarmament and engagement.

Neurotic identity crises come when our defense mechanisms have been too successful and we're encapsulated in the fortress we have constructed with nothing to refresh us in our solitary confinement. So we play the old movies with their stale fears and their unrealistic hopes until we become bored enough to risk disarmament and engagement.

This paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, of listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences other than one's own, of getting out of the boundaries of one's own experience. There's a currently popular argument that books help us feel empathy, but if they do so they do it by helping us imagine that we are people we are not. Or to go deeper within ourselves, to be more aware of what it means to be heartbroken, or ill, or six, or ninety-six, or completely lost. Not just versions of our self rendered awesome and eternally justified and always right, living in a world in which other people only exist to help reinforce our magnificence, though those kinds of books and movies exist in abundance to cater to the male imagination. Which is a reminder that literature and art can also help us fail at empathy if it sequesters us in the Big Old Fortress of Magnificent Me.

If You Could Read My Mind" If you could read my mind, love What a tale my thoughts could tell Just like an old-time movie 'Bout a ghost from a wishin' well In a castle dark or a fortress strong With chains upon my feet You know that ghost is me And I will never be set free As long as I'm a ghost that you can't see If I could read your mind, love What a tale your thoughts could tell Just like a paperback novel The kind the drugstores sell When you reach the part where the heartaches come The hero would be me But heroes often fail And you won't read that book again Because the ending's just too hard to take I'd walk away like a movie star Who gets burned in a three-way script Enter number two A movie queen to play the scene Of bringing all the good things out in me But for now love, let's be real I never thought I could act this way And I've got to say that I just don't get it I don't know where we went wrong But the feeling's gone and I just can't get it back If you could read my mind, love What a tale my thoughts could tell Just like an old-time movie 'Bout a ghost from a wishin' well In a castle dark or a fortress strong With chains upon my feet But stories always end And if you read between the lines You'll know that I'm just tryin' to understand The feelings that you lack I never thought I could feel this way And I've got to say that I just don't get it I don't know where we went wrong But the feeling's gone and I just can't get it back Gordon Lightfoot, Sit Down Young Stranger / If You Could Read My Mind (1970)

Unless you're living in the best neighborhoods, Philadelphia is indeed everything David Lynch claims it is: a very sick, twisted, violent, fear-ridden, decadent and decaying place. Huyen was so shocked, she wanted to go back to Vietnam immediately. Only pride prevented her from doing so. Grays Ferry was sullen and desolate and everyone seemed paranoid. Saigon is often squalid but it is never desolate. Vietnam is a disaster, agreed, but it is a socialized disaster, whereas America is -- for many people, natives or not -- a solitary nightmare. If Americans weren't so stoic and alienated, if they weren't' so cool, they wouldn't be so quiet about their desperation. Huyen could handle poverty, but she had no aptitude for paranoia, the one skill you needed to survive in Philadelphia. In Saigon you dreaded being cheated or robbed; in Philadelphia you feared getting raped and killed. In the end, Philadelphia was even worse than Eraserhead, because it didn't last for 108 minutes but went on forever. As in Vietnam, Huyen sought comfort in American movies to escape from the real America she could see just outside her window. Every American home was its own inviolable domain, a fortress with the door never left open. The rest of the world could go to hell as long as there was enough beer in the fridge and a good game on TV. And utopia was already on the internet, why go outside if you didn't have to? In the morning, Huyen kept the door locked, bolted and chained, and watched Jerry Springer -- in his glasses and tweed suit the image of a college professor -- to learn more about Americans and improve her colloquial English. In the afternoon, she took a bus to the YMCA to attend an ESL class. At night, the couple barely screwed in the land of bountiful screwing. His wife was so tense, Jaded went back to masturbating.

Satan has erected fortresses in people’s lives through incest, child abuse, domestic violence, alcoholism and countless other addictions, spiritual abuse—any way he can deceive, rob and enslave. But instead of tearing down these fortresses with truth and grace, the church has fought about the color of the hymnals. We have taught classes, built buildings, served on committees, and gone to seminars so that our leaders can feel spiritually gratified. We have spent our spiritual energy bribing our children to go to church and memorize Bible verses by promising them perfect attendance pins and trophies. We have taken each others’ spiritual inventories to make sure people aren’t going to movies, wearing makeup, or chewing gum in church. We have taught people prayer recipes and formulas. If this is really our job, we are truly spiritually overdressed. Have we lost our focus? Have we left behind our true job of leading people into the grace and real empowerment that comes from dwelling simply, honestly, closely with God? Do we keep adding to the “good news” until it’s not good anymore? We believe this is so.