Gauge Movie Quotes

Just wait, dude," Jamie had said. "I'm serious. It's fucking hard-core." Since Jamie described everything from zombie movies to his parents' fights to the new enchilada platter at Taco John's as "fucking hard-core," none of us could gauge much by it.

Even as I wrote my note to Fern, for instance, expressing sentiments and regrets that were real, a part of me was noticing what a fine and sincere note it was, and anticipating the effect on Fern of this or that heartfelt phrase, while yet another part was observing the whole scene of a man in a dress shirt and no tie sitting at his breakfast nook writing a heartfelt note on his last afternoon alive, the blondwood table's surface trembling with sunlight and the man's hand steady and face both haunted by regret and ennobled by resolve, this part of me sort of hovering above and just to the left of myself, evaluating the scene, and thinking what a fine and genuine-seeming performance in a drama it would make if only we all had not already been subject to countless scenes just like it in dramas ever since we first saw a movie or read a book, which somehow entailed that real scenes like the one of my suicide note were now compelling and genuine only to their participants, and to anyone else would come off as banal and even somewhat cheesy or maudlin, which is somewhat paradoxical when you consider – as I did, setting there at the breakfast nook – that the reason scenes like this will seem stale or manipulative to an audience is that we’ve already seen so many of them in dramas, and yet the reason we’ve seen so many of them in dramas is that the scenes really are dramatic and compelling and let people communicate very deep, complicated emotional realities that are almost impossible to articulate in any other way, and at the same time still another facet or part of me realizing that from this perspective my own basic problem was that at an early age I’d somehow chosen to cast my lot with my life’s drama’s supposed audience instead of with the drama itself, and that I even now was watching and gauging my supposed performance’s quality and probable effects, and thus was in the final analysis the very same manipulative fraud writing the note to Fern that I had been throughout the life that had brought me to this climactic scene of writing and signing it and addressing the envelope and affixing postage and putting the envelope in my shirt pocket (totally conscious of the resonance of its resting there, next to my heart, in the scene), planning to drop it in a mailbox on the way out to Lily Cache Rd. and the bridge abutment into which I planned to drive my car at speeds sufficient to displace the whole front end and impale me on the steering wheel and instantly kill me. Self-loathing is not the same thing as being into pain or a lingering death, if I was going to do it I wanted it instant’ (175-176)

His head exploded. I’d never seen someone’s head explode. I never thought I would. Maybe in the movies, but not in real life. It’s amazing what a 12-gauge can do at close range.

Because I live in south Florida I store cans of black beans and gallons of water in my closet in preparation for hurricane season. I throw a hurricane party in January. You’re my only guest. We play Marco Polo in bed. The sheets are wet like the roof caved in. There’s a million of me in you. You try to count me as I taste the sweat on the back of your neck. I call you Sexy Sexy, and we do everything twice. After, still sweating, we drink Crystal Light out of plastic water bottles. We discuss the pros and cons of vasectomies. It’s not invasive you say. I wrap the bedsheet around my waist. Minor surgery you say. You slur the word surgery, like it’s a garnish on a dish you just prepared. I eat your hair until you agree to no longer talk about vasectomies. We agree to have children someday, and that they will be beautiful even if they’re not. As I watch your eyes grow heavy like soggy clothes, I tell you When I grow up I’m going to be a famous writer. When I’m famous I’ll sign autographs on Etch-A-Sketches. I’ll write poems about writing other poems, so other poets will get me. You open your eyes long enough to tell me that when you grow up, you’re going to be a steamboat operator. Your pores can never be too clean you say. I say I like your pores just fine. I say Your pores are tops. I kiss you with my whole mouth, and you fall asleep next to my molars. In the morning, we eat french toast with powdered sugar. I wear the sugar like a mustache. You wear earmuffs and pretend we’re in a silent movie. I mouth Olive juice, but I really do love you. This is an awesome hurricane party you say, but it comes out as a yell because you can’t gauge your own volume with the earmuffs on. You yell I want to make something cute with you. I say Let me kiss the insides of your arms. You have no idea what I just said, but you like the way I smile.

I felt preposterously happy to see him. Felt, in fact, like I was in one of those movies where the woman goes into labor while her husband is out of town and he rushes back, gets there just in time. His face, gauging me, so full of tenderness and respect that you'd think he was my husband, even if he had no idea who I was or what he was doing with me--which makes him, I suppose, like most husbands.

Leaving Forever My son can look me level in the eyes now, and does, hard, when I tell him he cannot watch chainsaw murders at the midnight movie, that he must bend his mind to Biology, under this roof, in the clear light of a Tensor lamp. Outside, his friends throb with horsepower under the moon. He stands close, milk sour on his breath, gauging the heat of my conviction, eye-whites pink from his new contacts. He can see me better than before. And I can see myself in those insolent eyes, mostly head in the pupil's curve, closed in by the contours of his unwrinkled flesh. At the window he waves a thin arm and his buddies squall away in a glare of tail lights. I reach out my arm to his shoulder, but he shrugs free and shows me my father's narrow eyes, the trembling hand at my throat, the hard wall at the back of my skull, the raised fist framed in the bedroom window I had climbed through at three A.M. "If you hit me I'll leave forever," I said. But everything was fine in a few days, fine. "I would have come back," I said, "false teeth and all." Now, twice a year after the long drive, in the yellow light of the front porch, I breathe in my father's whiskey, ask for a shot, and see myself distorted in his thick glasses, the two of us grinning, as he holds me with both hands at arm's length.

Lydia shook her head. There was no way to tell what had been in Paul’s mind. “He knew from me what Anna Kilpatrick’s family was going through, and he watched those horrible movies despite that. Maybe because of it, because I think that he got off on knowing that Anna wasn’t the only one in pain. There were all these other layers of pain rippling through the family, through the community, and even to us—you, me, Mom, Grandma Ginny. He was constantly asking me about Anna Kilpatrick, or referring to the case, and gauging my reaction. He even brought it up the night he died.” She gave a dry laugh. “I thought he was asking because he cared about me, but now I can see that it was all part of his game. It’s the same kink as raping those women, then having them followed for so many years.

In the pre-internet age, holding conspiratorial beliefs usually meant holding those beliefs in isolation - you read discredited books, you wrote letters to fringe magazines, and you listened to Coast to Coast AM alone in the garage. The thought of an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory crossing into real politics (or even being quasi-validated by a main-stream newspaper) was absurd. Only the internet could make that possible. Before social media, there was no way to gauge the size of a conspiracy population, and individuals promoting unconventional concepts surrendered their credibility within the straight world. When Oliver Stone released the film JFK in 1991, it trafficked in a conspiracy a majority of Americans accepted - that the assassination of John F. Kennedy had involved more than one gunman. But JFK was still ridiculed in most serious publication, sometimes before the movie was even released. Stone was marginalized as a loon for promoting a possibility most people already believed.

I tell women to go to the movies alone because there’s something I think contemporary women need at the beginning of their art lives maybe almost as much as money: that feeling of freedom, where you don’t have to consider other people or their needs, or the ability to cultivate a barometer of self-reliance that can come from even something as small as going to a theater by yourself, seeing something, and not feeling the urge to tilt your head and gauge the amount of fun other people are having.

If friends or acquaintances seem to want to help with diagnosing, do not appear receptive. Let them know that your child has been diagnosed, that you have professional support and advice, and that you are following a regimen known to be the most successful for the most children. Parents complain that sometimes, with no encouragement, individuals will launch into a story that reminds them of the family’s situation. People are entertained and fascinated by tales. Some of the stories have dreadful and unrelated outcomes. There are books and movies available for the purpose of entertaining others. Feel free to put your child off limits when it comes to being the subject of tales for others. After hearing these unnecessary sad stories, mood is affected. Parents should watch and protect their mood gauges carefully! Parents can protect themselves from frustration by disengaging from these episodes, quickly excusing themselves to make a phone call, find the restroom, or check on something. It is certainly more appropriate to find an excuse than to fume about insensitivity later. Some people are drawn to special needs like a magnet, yet they have nothing positive to offer. Avoid these people.

Flatliners, the movie, turned into a train wreck, but only because the whole movie was only over a period of a month or so, meaning in reality all those people who flatlined, made into ghost people, were 1 month into a 10 year adjustment, and they tried to gauge if it was a good idea or not, to do, which is like assuming the first week of pregnancy is what pregnancy is like.