Planes Trains And Automobiles Quotes

You can start by wiping that fucking dumb-ass smile off your rosey, fucking, cheeks! Then you can give me a fucking automobile... a fucking Datsun, a fucking Toyota, a fucking Mustang, a fucking Buick! Four fucking wheels and a seat! And I really don't care for the way your company left me in the middle of fucking nowhere with fucking keys to a fucking car that isn't fucking there. And I really didn't care to fucking walk down a fucking highway and across a fucking runway to get back here to have you smile at my fucking face. I want a fucking car RIGHT FUCKING NOW!

But let me say this. I am a superstitious man, a ridiculous failing but I must confess it here. And so if some unlucky accident should befall my youngest son, if some police officer should accidentally shoot him, if he should hang himself while in his jail cell, if new witnesses appear to testify to his guilt, my superstition will make me feel that it was the result of the ill will still borne me by some people here. Let me go further. If my son is struck by a bolt of lightning I will blame some of the people here. If his plane show fall into the sea or his ship sink beneath the waves of the ocean, if he should catch a mortal fever, if his automobile should be struck by a train, such is my superstition that I would blame the ill will felt by people here. Gentlemen, that ill will, that bad luck, I could never forgive. But aside from that let me swear by the souls of my grandchildren that I will never break the peace we have made. After all, are we or are we not better men than those pezzonovanti who have killed countless millions of men in our lifetimes?

One of my delights in these books, on the other hand, has been to include movies not often cited as “great”—some because they are dismissed as merely popular (Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark), some because they are frankly entertainments (Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Rififi), some because they are too obscure (The Fall of the House of Usher, Stroszek). We go to different movies for different reasons, and greatness comes in many forms.

This massive, nearly incomprehensible economic miracle you are witnessing outside your window is due to one group of people and one group of people only – men.  And it was a transaction (the most important and original economic transaction) that incentivized men to make and build nearly everything on the planet - sex for resources.  Men build things, women give them sex.  Men produce things, women give them children.  Men accrue wealth and resources, women continue their genetic line.  Sex (or more Darwinistically speaking, progeny) is what gets men out of bed in the morning, off to school, into rush hour, off to the office, off to the factory, off to night school, off to war, or off to the lab to make money so that they might someday attract girls.  If there was no sex, if there were no women, if there was no female youth and beauty, men would still be living in caves, only mustering their resources to perhaps create beer and poker to bide the time.  Alas, the ONLY reason you have planes, trains, and automobiles, the only reason an economy exists, the only reason anything outside the sky exists, is because men built it.  And men built it in exchange for sex.

Internet, automobiles, trains, planes, house, diets, clothes, gadgets and toys exceeded all our basic needs. Today, we tend to go beyond and above. 

The mind does some of its best wandering when the body’s moving forward. This is true on a bike, or on foot, or on a plane, train, or in an automobile, anything. There’s just something about steady onward motion that’s uniquely conducive to shedding any hang-ups and inviting real mental latitude. And, it seems, conversely, the mind is best at plunging forward, at submitting itself to something and following a fixed path, when the body is stationary. In a quiet room between sixty-eight and seventy-four degrees, wearing clothes that are snug but comfortable, sitting upright. Free of any distraction. Unlike out here, the room has no exigencies, so the mind makes up its own. Work, it says. Or watch, read. Dedicate me to something specific. A mind narrows in on that thing then moves resolutely toward it, doing its best to ward off anything that might interrupt or alter its course; thought is a train, consciousness a stream…

You're the guy who tried to get my cab. I knew I knew you! You scared the bejesus out of me. Come to think of it it was easy to get a cab during rush hour? I am sorry. I had no idea it was your cab. Let me make it up to you. How about a nice hot dog and a beer. Just a hot dog then. Some coffee? Milk? Soda? Tea? LifeSavers? Slurpee? Just let me know. I'm here. knew I knew ya!

You're the guy who tried to get my cab. I knew I knew you! You scared the bejesus out of me. Come to think of it it was easy to get a cab during rush hour? I am sorry. I had no idea it was your cab. Let me make it up to you. How about a nice hot dog and a beer. Just a hot dog then. Some coffee? Milk? Soda? Tea? LifeSavers? Slurpee? Just let me know. I'm here. I knew I knew ya!

Literary friendship is impossible, it seems; at least, it is impossible for me. Indeed, all male friendships outside of work sometimes seem to be impossible: you look at each other at the restaurant at some point in the conversation and you know that each of you is thinking, man, this is futile, why are we here, we’re wasting our time, we have nothing to say, we’re not involved in some project together that we can bitch about, we can’t flirt, we feel like dummies discussing movies or books, we aren’t in some moral bind with a woman that we need to confess, we’ve each said the other is a genius several times already, and the whole thing is depressing and the tone is false and we might as well go home to our wives and children and rent buddy movies like Midnight Run or Planes, Trains, and Automobiles or The Pope of Greenwich Village> when we need a shot of the old camaraderie.

The extraordinary success of a few internet companies has masked the embarrassing lack of major breakthroughs in other domains. There has been little improvement in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, which affect nearly a third of all Americans over the age of eighty-five. There is still no cure for cancer. Life expectancy is declining in many parts of the world. So is quality of life. The Concorde made its last flight in 2003. Trains, planes, and automobiles move about as fast today as they did fifty years ago. Inflation-adjusted wages have stagnated for most Americans since the early 1960s—while the absolute size of paychecks has grown, purchasing power has not.5

Over the decades since, it had been updated and overhauled several times to include other Hughes classics like Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful, She’s Having a Baby, Uncle Buck, Mr. Mom, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, The Great Outdoors, and the aforementioned Home Alone and Vacation flicks.

Planets. Stars. Planes, trains, and automobiles. This is the physics of Newton, the physics of the visible and tangible world around us.