Christmas is all about hope. Kids hope for new toys. You get older, and the toys get bigger, but the hope stays the same. Some people might hope for peace on earth, or maybe for a better tomorrow, whatever their idea of that might be. But most people still just want something bright and shiny and new.
Do you know the feeling of daring yourself to walk across a dark room? That way you’re excited because you know, you really do know, that there is nothing there to hurt you. Some people get to choose their dark rooms. They get to look for places where the fear is only skin deep. But some people are nowhere near that lucky.
Even when we know we’ll never find the answers, we have to keep on asking questions.
Everyone knows not to stare into the sun. It’s something your mother tells you when you’re a kid, “Don’t stare at the sun, or you’ll go blindâ€. But sometimes you want to understand something so badly, that you’ll risk going blind for just a glimpse of what it might all be about.
Hiya, Tootz. I programmed this video file to send itself in twenty-four hours if I didn’t delete it. I didn’t delete it, so I guess you must’ve deleted me…Yeah, I sorta saw that one coming.
How do you let someone go? How do you understand that that’s alright, that everything changes? How do you find a way for that to make you feel good about life, instead of breaking your heart? The hardest thing you’ll ever learn is how to say goodbye.
I don’t know what will happen next, I don’t know what I’m going to be, what I’m going to learn. But what I do know is this. Life, all life, is about asking questions, not about knowing answers. It is wanting to see what’s over the next hill that keeps us all going. We have to keep asking questions, wanting to understand, even when we know we’ll never find the answers. We have to keep on asking the questions.
I don’t watch daytime TV. It weirds me out
I guess I always knew there was something different and me. But when all of this began to happen, when I started to be able to do things, it was kind of scary. Like in a dream where you start falling and it feels kind of good and you begin to wonder if you’ll ever be able to stop.
We had come to the time I had always known was coming. I’d always had this feeling that one day I would have to do something very hard. I just hoped that I could find a way to do it without any one getting hurt.
Most of the fights people have are about something simple. You want something the other person has, or maybe they’re afraid you’re going to want it and they go after you first. People always think that if they win, then that’s the end. Everything will be all right from then on. But everything changes, and tomorrow, the thing you were fighting for, will just be a memory. Like everything else, it’s already past.
My mother used to sing to me a lot. Folk songs mostly and things she liked when she was a little girl. There was this one song called “ Further Along†that always made me feel better when I was sad. “Further along, we’ll know more about it. Further along, we’ll understand why. Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine. We’ll understand it all by and by.†When you get to wondering too much about things, a song like that can really help.
When I was very little, my mother would read nursery rhymes to me. I always hated Humpty Dumpty. That’s a very scary poem. No one knows how to put it back together again. Not all the kings horse or all the kings men. No one wants to think that there’s anything in the world that could fall apart that badly. But of coarse, anything can. I guess that’s what’s so scary about Humpty Dumpty.
I had done what I could. I had tried to make the soldiers think that they’re plan to use me as bate hadn’t worked, that I had been taken away. I thought that if I could make them believe that I was gone,
I have this idea about why people do the terrible things they do, same reason little kids push each other on the schoolyard. If you’re the one doing the pushing, then you’re not going to be the one who gets pushed. If you’re the monster, then nothing will be waiting in the shadows to jump out at you. It’s pretty simple really. People do the terrible things they do because they’re scared.
I love you. Everyday of the week and twice on Sundays.
I think when you’re older, what gets hard is that you forget how to take things as they come, and sometimes, the things that do come are more than anyone should have to take.
If a dream is just a dream, something that happens in your mind while you’re asleep, then that’s alright. It’s yours to take with you into the morning, and it fades away into the light. But when the dreams start to come when you’re awake, and they come with the light, then that is not alright. What we look for then is other people who have dreamed what we’ve dreamed, who have seen what we’ve seen. When the dreams become real, sometimes the only comfort you can find is in knowing that you’re not alone.
In the cartoons, someone can run off a cliff and they’re fine and they don’t fall until they look down. My mom always said that was the secret of life: never look down. But it’s more than that. It’s not just about not looking. it’s about not ever realizing that you’re in the middle of the air and you don’t know how to fly.
Is every moment of our lives built into us before we’re born? If it is, does that make us less responsible for the things we do, or is the responsibility built in too? After you hit the ball, do you stand and wait to see if it goes out, or do you start running and let nature take its course?
Mary: I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying to yourself, I can get the girl by myself. Why do I need this bitch in the mix?
General Beers: I prefer not to use the term in the mix.
Most people change kind of slowly, they’re who they are, then after a while, they’re someone else. But some people know the exact moment where their lives changed. They saw the person they were going to marry or the look in their baby’s eyes the first time he smiled. For some people, it’s not the good things in life that made them change. It’s something they’ve gone through that makes everything they look at from that moment on, seem very different from how it had always been.
My father liked to say that there were these things in life that didn’t make any sense and they could never make any sense, and if you were anywhere near smart, you knew that. But your job is not to give up, to keep on trying to make sense out of them anyway. Trying to understand things that could never be understood. I guess maybe people will always find different names for their answers. But the one thing is, their questions will always be the same.
My grandfather used to tell my mom that kids should never have to worry about anything more serious than baseball. Everything you need to know is there. It has success and failure, moments where you come together and moments where you stand alone, and it has an ending. Not a clock, like in other sports, but an ending. “And that,†my grandfather used to say to my mom, “Is as close as a kid should have to come to that sort of thing.â€
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I asked my dad once about his dad, my grandfather. I knew he’d had some hard times but I didn’t know a lot more than that. I said to my dad, “I guess maybe he was kind of lost.†“Not lost really,†my dad said, “but for a while he was definitely bewildered.â€
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I remember my mom telling me that she only went to church once, with once with her mother of Easter Sunday. When the minister said that the kingdom of heaven was within her that scared her half to death. It meant it was all up to her. People want the comfort of strong arms, they look to the voices in their heads, to drugs, they look to the sky.
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When you’re a kid, anything can take you away. Soap bubbles or a hose spraying a rainbow up over a new mowed lawn. I guess growing up means that it gets harder and harder to find your way back to that kind of place where you can be taken. The one time I see grown-ups with that same sort of look on their faces, is when they’re first falling in love.
My mom told me once that when you’re afraid of something, what you want more than anything else is to make it go away, you want your life back to the way it was before you found out that there was something to be afraid of. You want to build a high wall and live your old life behind it. But nothing ever stays the same. That’s not your old life at all, that’s you new life with a wall around it. Your choice is not about going back to the way things were, your choice is about hiding or about going right to the heart of the thing that scares you.
My mom says that life is like a roller coaster ride. There are ups and downs, there are big scares and slow builds, and places where it levels out. The only difference is, that every time it stops, you get off in some place totally different from where you got on.
I remember the first time that I ever saw dolphins. I was three. It was the first time in my life I can remember knowing that something was beautiful. And it was the first time I had the feeling there was something about me that was different from everybody else.
As long as I can remember, people have liked to talk to me, you know, kind of how somebody says something to you, doesn’t have to mean so much. It’s just that it opens a door for you and you can see into a room you couldn’t see into before. It doesn’t really matter how you got there, the important part is, you’re seeing something new and different.
I grew up, just my mom and me. I never thought a lot about who my father was or where he’d gone. I guess I knew there was something missing, but when you’re a kid, your life is just your life. You don’t think about all the other ways it might have been.
My mother always talked to me a lot about the sky. She liked to watch the clouds in the day and the stars at night. Especially the stars. We would play a game sometimes, a game called ‘what’s beyond the sky’; we would imagine darkness, or a blinding light, or something else we didn’t know how to name. But of course that was just a game. There’s nothing beyond the sky, the sky just is, and it goes on and on, and we play all of our games beneath it.
Owen: Can you imagine what would have happened to people if, in 1947, they thought that we were going to be invaded by aliens?
Sam: Gee, I don’t know…growth of the military-industrial complex? Trials to see if you were an alien sympathizer?
People are lonely in this world for lots of different reasons. Some people have something in their disposition. Maybe they were born too mean or maybe they were born too tender. But most people are brought to where they are by circumstance. By calamity or a broken heart or something else happening in their lives that wasn’t anything they planned on. People are lonely in this world for lots of different reasons. The only thing that I do know is, it doesn’t matter what any one of them might tell you, nobody wants to be alone.
People believe what they want to believe. They find meaning where they can and they cling to it. In the end, it really doesn’t matter what’s a trick and what’s
true. What matters is that people believe.
People come home for a lot of different reasons. They come home to remember. They come home because they’ve got no place else to go. They come home when they’re beaten and they come home when they’re proud. They come home looking for a door out into their past or a road out into their future. They come home for a lot of reasons, but they always come home to say good-bye.
Some people put a lot of work into their lawn. As if a patch of green grass was the most important thing in the world. As if they thought that as long as the lawn out front was green and mown and beautiful, it wouldn’t matter at all what was going on inside the house.
When everything in your life is right on track, it’s easy to believe that things happen for a reason. It’s easy to have faith. But when things start to go wrong, then it’s very hard to hold onto that faith. Its hard not to wonder whose reasons these things are happening for.
What makes a man who he is? Is it the worst things he’s ever done or the best things he wants to be? When you find yourself in the middle of your life and you’re nowhere near where you were going, how do you find a way from the person you’ve become to the one you know you could have been?
People move through their lives sometimes without really thinking about where they’re going. The days pile up and they get sadder and lonelier without really knowing why they’re so sad or how they got so lonely. Then something happens. They meet someone who looks a certain way or has something in their smile. Maybe that’s all that falling in love is, finding someone who makes you feel a little less alone.
Sometimes people come to a moment where they thing they’ve found that one last chance to be someone else, and they go for it. When it doesn’t work out, they spend the rest of their lives looking back over their shoulder at what might have been.
I never met my grandfather, but my father told me that
People say that when we grow up, we kick at everything we’ve been told – we rebel against the world our parents have worked so hard to bring us into, that part of growing up is kicking at the ties that bind. But I don’t think that’s why we kick at all. I think we kick when we find out that our parents don’t know much more about the world than we do… they don’t have all the answers. We rebel when we find out that they’ve been lying to us all along. That there isn’t any Santa Claus at all.
Russell Keys came home from the war like a lot of other soldiers. He was tired of fighting and he was very glad to be coming home. There were things that had happened to him and he knew he was not the same person he has been when he left. He had changed, and he wondered about all the things here at home that might have changed too, while he had been away. But sometimes when you go somewhere far away and then come back, the part that bothers you most, is not the things that have changed but the way that other things have stayed the same, like you hadn’t been anywhere or done anything at all. The kids still play ball in the vacant lot where he and his friends had played every summer. The high school band would still play every Friday night in the park downtown. And old Mrs. Parker would still be waiting as the kids came home from school, to yell at them if they stepped on her flowers. All of that might still be the same, but he was different, and so nothing would really be the same at all.
Some people have give up all hope that anything in their lives ever changes. They just go on with it day by day, and if something were to come along and make things different, they probably wouldn’t even notice it right off, except maybe for that kind of nervous feeling you get in your stomach. My mom and I used to call that the car trip feeling. Because it was how I’d feel whenever I knew we were going to go somewhere far away or somewhere new.
Some people spend their lives hoping for something to happen that will change everything. They look for power or love, or the answers to their biggest questions. I think really what they’re looking for is another chance. Some way to lead another life where all the mistakes they’ve made would be erased, and they could just start over, nothing bad has happened yet, and all their possibilities are still in front of them.
Sometimes the best way to move into the unknown is to take familiar steps, small steps. To do ordinary things to deal with something that is in no way ordinary. We’re always going someplace new, all the time. Familiar things just let us pretend that we aren’t moving into unfamiliar territory. You take those small familiar steps, and you try to be honest, not to live as if nothing had changed but still to go on with your life. But there are times when what you need is a piece of how things used to be.
That summer a lot of things happened that people couldn’t explain. There had been lights in the sky and stories in the paper about saucers crashing. John had come, and then he had gone. For a while, life went back to being life and almost everyone forgot the things that that summer had brought with it from the sky.
The world is made up of the big things that happen and the small ones. And the part that’s so unfair is that we call them big and small, because when something happens to you, when you lose something or someone that you really care about, that’s all there is. The world may be blowing up around you, but you don’t care about that. You don’t care about that at all.
There are times when it seems like the whole world is afraid. When the fear is something you have to live with day in and day out. When people get scared, they do a lot of different things. They fight, or run. They destroy the thing they’re afraid of, or they put a lot of distance between it and them. Make it something you can shoot at with a friction action gun.
They say some men carry there was with them for the rest of their lives. And some men put it behind them like an old pair of shoes. And them I guess there are others who go on fighting, even if they have no idea who they’re fight is with or why it’s so important not to give up.
We all like to think that we have some control over the events in our lives, and a lot of the time we can fool ourselves into thinking that we really are in charge. But then something happens to remind us that the world runs by its own rules and not ours, that we’re just along for the ride.
We’re all standing at the edge of a cliff all the time every day, a cliff we’re all going over. Our choice isn’t about that. Our choice is about whether we want to go kicking and screaming, or whether we might want to open our eyes and our hearts to what happens once we start to fall.
What makes us human? That we can think? That we can feel sorrow and pain? Maybe. That we can laugh? I hope so. We can hurt or we can laugh, and we know our past and our present, and in some ways, the future. Maybe what makes us human is that we know just enough to think we know where we’re going.
What’s a five-letter word for idiot?
When you’ve done something that you can’t take back, something that you don’t understand, you start to hold tightly to the things you do understand. And you try to make sense out of everything you can, ’cause if you believed that all you had to do to make things right was to find a reason. But what happens when you find the reasons, and they are not your own? How do you find any comfort or any sense in that?
When you’re a kid all you ever want is for the stories your mom reads to be real. You think you can crawl inside the world that’s in every book and live in the pictures on every page. But deep down, you know that this isn’t something that could ever happen. But it’s knowing that the magic isn’t quit there, that it’s just over the next hill, or maybe in the next story, that makes you feel safe in your bed at night. You really wouldn’t want it to be any other way.
When you’re little, you like to think you know everything, but the last thing you really want is to know too much. What you really want is for grown-ups to make the world a safe place where dreams can come true and promises are never broken. And when you’re little, it doesn’t seem like a lot to ask.
Why do people want so desperately not to be alone? Why is it more comforting to think that you are being watched than to know that no one at all is watching? And why really does that make us any less alone? In the end, if there are others out there, then would we be, all of us, still alone together?
Page Topic: Movie Quotes from ‘Taken’: Quotes from the movie ‘Taken’
