β
True inspiration is impossible to fake.
β
β
Arthur; Christopher Nolan
β
ARTHUR: What happened?
ARIADNE: Cobb stayed.
ARTHUR: With Mal?
ARIADNE: No. To find Saito.
Arthur looks out at the water below the bridge.
ARTHUR: He'll be lost...
ARIADNE: No. He'll be alright.
β
β
Christopher Nolan (Inception: The Shooting Script)
β
EAMES: Shouldn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, Arthur-
Eames lines up a shot with a grenade launcher. Fires- the sniper EXPLODES into the air- Arthur looks at Eames.
EAMES: Shall we?
β
β
Christopher Nolan (Inception: The Shooting Script)
β
ARTHUR: The only way to wake up from inside the dream is to die.
β
β
Christopher Nolan (Inception: The Cobol Job)
β
ARTHUR: (indicates rain) Couldn't you have peed before we went under?
YUSUF: Sorry.
The front door OPENS and Eames climbs in, soaked.
EAMES: Bit too much free champagne before takeoff, Yusuf?
YUSUF: Ha bloody ha.
β
β
Christopher Nolan (Inception: The Shooting Script)
β
ARTHUR: It'd have to be a 747.
COBB: Why?
ARTHUR: On a 747 the pilots are up above, first class is in the nose so nobody walks through the cabin. We'd have to buy out the whole cabin, and the first class flight attendant-
SAITO: We bought the airline.
Everyone turns to Saito.
SAITO: It seemed... neater.
β
β
Christopher Nolan (Inception: The Shooting Script)
β
EAMES: Try this... "MY FATHER ACCEPTS THAT I WANT TO CREATE FOR MYSELF, NOT FOLLOW IN HIS FOOTSTEPS."
COBB: That might work.
ARTHUR: Might? We'll have to do better than that.
EAMES: Thanks for the contribution, Arthur.
ARTHUR: Forgive me for wanting a little specificity, Eames.
β
β
Christopher Nolan (Inception: The Shooting Script)
β
EAMES: Now, in the dream, I can impersonate Browning and suggest the concepts to Fischer's conscious mind...
EAMES: (draws a diagram) Then we take Fischer down another level and his own subconscious feeds it right back to him.
ARTHUR: (impressed) So he gives himself the idea.
EAMES: Precisely. That's the only way to make it stick. It has to seem self-generated.
ARTHUR: Eames, I'm impressed.
EAMES: Your condescension, as always, is much appreciated, Arthur.
β
β
Christopher Nolan (Inception: The Shooting Script)
β
COBB: What do you want from us?
SAITO: Inception.
Arthur raises his eyebrows. Cobb is poker-faced.
SAITO: Is it possible?
ARTHUR: Of course not.
SAITO: If you can steal an idea from someone's mind, why can't you plant one there instead?
ARTHUR: Okay, here's planting an idea: I say to you, "Don't think about elephants."
(Saito nods)
What are you thinking about?
SAITO: Elephants.
ARTHUR: Right. But it's not your idea because you know I gave it to you.
SAITO: You could plant it subconsciously-
ARTHUR: The subject's mind can always trace the genesis of the idea. True inspiration is impossible to fake.
COBB: No, it isn't.
SAITO: Can you do it?
COBB: I won't do it.
SAITO: In exchange, I'll give you the information you were paid to steal.
COBB: Are you giving me a choice? Because I can find my own way to square things with Cobol.
SAITO: Then you do have a choice.
COBB: And I choose to leave.
β
β
Christopher Nolan (Inception: The Shooting Script)
β
ARTHUR: He's out.
ARIADNE: Wait, Cobb-I'm lost. Whose subconscious are we going into?
COBB: Fischer's. I told him it was Browning's so he'd come with us as part of our team.
ARTHUR: (impressed) He's going to help us break into his own subconscious.
COBB: That's the idea. He'll think that his security is Browning's and fight them to learn the truth about his father.
β
β
Christopher Nolan (Inception: The Shooting Script)
β
ARTHUR: How do we get out once we've made the plant?
(to Cobb)
I hope you've got something a little more elegant than shooting me in the head like last time.
Arthur tilts back in his chair. Yusuf turns to Cobb.
COBB: A kick.
ARIADNE: What's a kick?
Eames slips his foot under Arthur's chair leg. TIPS it- Arthur's legs SHOOT UP INSTINCTIVELY for balance-
EAMES: That, Ariadne, would be a kick.
COBB: That feeling of falling which snaps you awake. We use that to jolt ourselves awake once we're done.
β
β
Christopher Nolan (Inception: The Shooting Script)
β
ARIADNE: Do you use a timer?
ARTHUR: No, I have to judge it myself. Once you're all asleep in room 528, I wait 'til Yusuf starts his kick...
ARIADNE: How will you know?
ARTHUR: His music warns me it's coming, then the van hitting the barrier of the bridge should be unmistakable-that's when I blow the floor out from underneath us and we get a nice synchronized kick. Too soon, and we won't get pulled out; too late and I won't be able to drop us.
ARIADNE: Why not?
ARTHUR: The van will be in free fall. I can't drop us without gravity.
β
β
Christopher Nolan (Inception: The Shooting Script)
β
EAMES: Word is, you're not welcome in these parts.
COBB: Yeah?
EAMES: There's a price on your head from Cobol Engineering. Pretty big one, actually.
COBB: You wouldn't sell me out.
Eames looks at Cobb, offended.
EAMES: 'Course I would.
COBB: (smiles) Not when you hear what I'm selling.
A ramshackle balcony overlooking a busy street. Eames pours.
COBB: Inception.
Eames' glass stops halfway to his mouth.
COBB: Don't bother telling me it's impossible.
EAMES: It's perfectly possible. Just bloody difficult.
COBB: That's what I keep saying to Arthur.
EAMES: Arthur? You're still working with that stick-in-the-mud?
COBB: He's a good point man.
EAMES: The best. But he has no imagination. If you're going to perform inception, you need imagination.
COBB: You've done it before?
EAMES: Yes and no. We tried it. Got the idea in place, but it didn't take.
COBB: You didn't plant it deep enough?
EAMES: It's not just about depth. You need the simplest version of the idea-the one that will grow naturally in the subject's mind. Subtle art.
β
β
Christopher Nolan (Inception: The Shooting Script)
β
Or take historians, the quintessential assemblers of existing facts and ideas. Weirdly, they fall way out of the typical range for decline, peaking 39.7 years after career inception, on average. Think what this implies: Say you intend to pursue a career as a professional historian and finish your PhD at thirty-two. The bad news is that in your fifties, you are still pretty wet behind the ears. But hereβs the good news: at age seventy-two, you still have half your work to go! Better take care of your health so you can write your best books into your eighties.
β
β
Arthur C. Brooks (From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life)
β
Let me repeat: to talk of 'directiveness' , or purpose in this limited sense, in ontogeny, has become respectable once more; but to apply these terms to phylogeny is still considered heretical (or at least in bad taste). But phylogeny is an abstraction, which only acquires a concrete meaning when we realise that 'phylogeny, evolutionary descent, is a sequence of ontogenies', and that 'the course of evolution is through changes in ontogeny'. The quotations in the previous sentence are actually also by Simpson and contain the answer to his own conundrum about the Purposer behind the purpose. The Purposer is each and every individual organism, from the inception of life, which struggled and strove to make the best of its limited opportunities.
β
β
Arthur Koestler
β
While I realize that there are a lot of different angles on this, Iβm going to set all of these speculations aside for now and try focusing entirely on trends in fantasy from the perspective of tabletop gaming alone. The first thing you need to know is that the men who laid the groundwork for the role-playing hobby had an incredible appetite for books. You may have been in a comic book shop on a Wednesday when the new shipment came in and the most dedicated fans in your town are right there to get the latest installment of everything theyβre into. Well, Gary Gygax and James M. Ward were like that with books: One fateful Tuesday, I was poring through the racks, picking up the newest Conan and Arthur C. Clarke novels. When I reached the end of the racks, I had seven books in my hand. There was a gentleman doing the very same thing beside me. When he got done, he and I had the exact same books in our hands. We laughed at the coincidence and he started talking about a game he had just invented where a person could play Conan fighting Set. I was instantly hooked on the idea. A few weeks later I was regularly going over to Gary Gygaxβs house to learn the game of Dungeons & Dragons.1 Note that the main selling point of the game at its inception was that it was not merely an adaption of their favorite stories to game form. No, the βlightning in the bottleβ that Gary Gygax had gotten hold of was, in fact, the apex of genre fiction.2 He was opening up an entirely new method for creating worlds and allowing people to enter them. We take it for granted today, but J. Eric Holmes was not exaggerating when he declared that it was a βtruly unique invention, probably as remarkable as the die, or the deck of cards, or the chessboard.β3
β
β
Jeffro Johnson (Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons)
β
At the heart of the English character lay a fund of kindliness. Though in the mass rough and often cruel, and passionately addicted to barbarous sports like bull-baiting and cock-fighting, they led the world in humanitarian endeavour. It was an Englishman who in the 'seventies and 'eighties, at extreme risk and personal inconvenience, travelled 50,000 miles visiting the putrid, typhus-ridden jails of Europe; and it was Englishmen who at the close of the century first instituted organised opposition to cruelty to children and animals. But nothing so well illustrates the slow but persistent national impulse to mitigate inhumanity as the popular condemnation of the slave trade. This movement ran directly counter to the immediate material interests of the country; it none the less steadily gained strength from its inception by a handful of Quakers in the 'sixties until at the end of the century it was espoused by the Prime Minister himself and the overwhelming majority of thinking Englishmen.
β
β
Arthur Bryant (The Years of Endurance, 1793-1802)