Violet Beauregarde: Well, I'm a gum chewer, normally. But when I heard about these ticket things of Wonka's, I laid off the gum and switched to candy bars, instead. Now, of course, I'm right back on gum. I chew it all day, except at mealtimes when I ...
Dorothy: I'm frightened, Auntie Em! I'm frightened! [Auntie Em's image appears in the crystal ball] Auntie Em: Dorothy? Dorothy? Where are you? It's me, Auntie Em! We're trying to find you! Where are you? Dorothy: I'm here in Oz, Auntie Em! I'm locke...
Bill Sampson: The Theatuh, the Theatuh - what book of rules says the Theater exists only within some ugly buildings crowded into one square mile of New York City? Or London, Paris or Vienna? Listen, junior. And learn. Want to know what the Theater is...
How can I be so captured by my own imagination that I can truly connect both to the person I'm playing and to the person I'm playing with... I didn't know it, but what I was really looking for was compassion. Not consciously, of course. I didn't cons...
{ } Despite their opposing religious views, the old revivalist on his deathbed asked to read to him from the black book clutched to his chest. relented, took the book, and was surprised to discover that it wasn't the Bible. It was describing the nobl...
[N]early every creationist debater will mention the second law of thermodynamics and argue that complex systems like the earth and life cannot evolve, because the second law seems to say that everything in nature is running down and losing energy, no...
Watching Paris is Burning, I began to think that the many yuppie-looking, straight -acting, pushy, predominantly white folks in the audience were there because the film in no way interrogates “whiteness.” These folks left the film saying it was �...
Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying motherhood lacks meaning. There's great dignity in the smallness of motherhood; we're essential in our contingency. And though we may not follow the Western model of the epic hero, we mothers can find a m...
The museums in children’s minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror—to protect the children from eternal grief. For my own part, though: It would have been catastrophe if I had forgotten my sister at once. I had nev...
,' Dad said, 'has the sort of ellipsis ending most American audiences would rather undergo a root canal than be left with, not only because they loathe anything left to the imagination-we're talking about the country that invented spandex-but also be...
The most critical of these new religious developments for twentieth-century religious liberalism were a renewed and transformed emphasis on mystical practice and experience, the healing ministry known as mind cure, and the rise of modern psychology. ...
As a rule, we don't like to feel to sad or lonely or depressed. So why do we like music (or books or movies) that evoke in us those same negative emotions? Why do we choose to experience in art the very feelings we avoid in real life? Aristotle deals...
There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art. The trick is to keep a secret. Or many secrets, even. In Lee Child’s books, Jack Reacher always has a big mystery to crack, but there are ...
Tony Stark: [about Loki killing Coulson] He made it personal. Steve Rogers: That's not the point. Tony Stark: That IS the point. That's Loki's point! He hit us all right where we live. Why? Steve Rogers: To tear us apart. Tony Stark: Yeah, divide and...
Nina: I came to ask for the part. Thomas Leroy: The truth is when I look at you all I see is the white swan. Yes you're beautiful, fearful, and fragile. Ideal casting. But the black swan? It's a hard fucking job to dance both. Nina: I can dance the b...
One of the things that I have learned, one of the attainments of the long travails and tribulations, has been, I think, coming to a simpler sense of myself that I think correlates to a simpler sense of others. Something closer to what I now call the ...
Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and s...
Too embarrassed even to try as long as everyone was looking at me, I made what was probably a fairly unique request. ‘Um, I’ll have a go. But I can’t do it if you’re all looking at me. Can I go inside the wardrobe and sing from there?’ The ...
I don’t have any regrets,” a famous movie actor said in an interview I recently witnessed. “I’d live everything over exactly the same way.” “That’s really pathetic,” the talk show host said. “Are you seeking help?” “Yeah. My shr...
Rebecca: Oh! It's that comedian I was telling you about. [she turns up the volume on her television, which is showing an odd-looking man performing stand-up comedy] Rebecca: See this bit, it's the absolute worst. Joey McCobb, the Stand Up Comic: [on ...
Jesse: I know what you mean about wishing somebody wasn't there, though. It's just usually it's myself that I wish I could get away from. Seriously, think about this. I have never been anywhere that I haven't been. I've never had a kiss when I wasn't...