Grand Canyon - Memorable Quotes

Davis: Listen to what you're saying under what you think you're saying: control, control, control. When are you gonna realise nothing can be controlled? We live in chaos.

And you know what it is they're trying to control, each and every one of 'em? Fear. They're trying to control their fear.

Why is it, when someone's successful in one field, they think they know about everything?

Street boy: You gotta answer one more thing for me, and you gotta tell me the truth. Are you askin' me a favour as a sign of respect, or are you askin' me a favour cos I got the gun?

Simon: Man, the world ain't supposed to work like this. I mean, maybe you don't know that, but this ain't the way it's supposed to be. I'm supposed to be able to do my job without asking you if I can. That dude is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you rippin' him off. Everything's supposed to be different than what it is.

Mack: What's goin' on in the world?

Simon: This neighbourhood has gone to sh-t.

Mack: This country has gone to sh-t.

Simon: You can go swimmin' in the ocean every day and be perfectly cool, you know. Then one day, just one particular day, you bump into the big shark. The big shark don't hate you. He's got no feelin' for you at all. You look like food to him.

Mack: I'm amazed at the end of each day that anybody's alive. Then other days I think maybe people aren't so fragile.

Simon: Things have always been kind of brutal, and people just keep on going.

Mack: We were planning to take my boy.
Simon: How old is he?
Mack: 15.
Simon: 15? Probably won't wanna go with you now. Probably go with his friends and his chick now. You've missed that boat.

Simon: You can sit right on the edge of it. I did that. I did everything. I went down in it, I stayed overnight there. But the thing that got me was sitting on the edge of that big old thing. Those rocks. Man, those cliffs and rocks, they're so old. It took so long for that thing to get to look like that. And it ain't done, either. It happens right while you're sitting there watchin' it. It's happenin' right now while we're sitting here in this ugly town. When you sit on the edge of that thing, you just realise what a joke we people are. What big heads we got, thinkin' that what we do is gonna matter all that much. Thinkin' our time here means diddly to those rocks. It's a split second we've been here, the whole lot of us. And one of us? That's a piece of time too small to get a name.

Those rocks were laughing at me, I could tell. Me and my worries. It was real humorous to that Grand Canyon. You know what I felt like? Ifelt like a gnat that lands on the ass of a cow that's chewing its cud next to the road that you ride by on at 70 miles an hour.

Claire: Sunscreen, hat, allergy pills, summer reading, floss. Watch out for poison oak, Lyme ticks, bears, dragons... pestilence.

Mack: He's leaving home, bye-bye (singing to the melody of The Beatles's She's Leaving Home)

Dee: Jane, do you ever feel like you're just this far from being completely hysterical 24 hours a day?

Jane: Half the people I know feel that way. The lucky ones feel that way. The rest of the people are hysterical 24 hours a day.

Mack: When a person thinks they're about to die, nothing looks like it was worth their time.

Claire: Look, Mack, I don't even know what I'm gonna say from one second to the next. The world doesn't make any sense to me any more. What's going on? There are babies lying around in the streets. There are people living in boxes. There are people ready to shoot you if you look at them. And we're getting used to it. The world is so nuts, it makes me wonder about all the choices that we've made.

Davis: Roberto's maybe the best thing that ever happened in your life. But he's 15 now. He's pretty much done with you. He'll be moving out. You thought you'd get back to the freedom you had back when you were first married. Fact is, you feel you're getting old way too fast.

Davis' Girlfriend: It's just that I wanna have children. And I don't care how rotten the world is. But I'm so far from being able to have them. I'm involved with you. You're not gonna have kids with me. We're not even gonna get married. So I can't even start to try to have 'em. I gotta break up with you and find someone I can stand to be with. Even then, I don't know how easy it's gonna be. I might have trouble getting pregnant, after everything I've done to my body.

Mack: One morning, about three years ago, I was on my way to a meeting at the Mutual Benefit building on Wilshire, in the Miracle Mile. I love that name - the Miracle Mile. It's the building across the street from the county art museum, I was thinking about the meeting I was going to, I was worried about it, actually, I started to step off the curb, A stranger grabbed me and yanked me back as a city bus went flying by my nose, I mean, it just fiilled up the world six inches from my nose, I would have been like a wet bug stain on the bus, I wouldn't have even felt it, it would have been over so fast, I thanked this stranger, this woman in a baseball cap, but I was pretty much in a daze, When I thanked her, she said ''My pleasure,'' I didn't notice till the last moment that the cap was from the Pittsburgh Pirates, my favourite team since I was a kid.

I never got over the idea that I should have thanked that woman more, talked to her a while, something. She reached out and yanked me back from the edge, literally. Changed everything for me, and for my wife and my son, and then she just wandered off down the Miracle Mile.

How come she was wearing a Pirates cap?

I just wondered, later on, was she for real, you know? Was that a real person or was that something else, you know, sent from somewhere else, to grab me back from that curb?

I didn't wanna just let you Simon drift away like she did and never talk to you. It just didn't seem right to let it happen twice. So that's why I'm bothering you.

Davis: At the end of this long, torturous night, my head pounding in syncopation to my throbbing wound, there came a glorious, delicate dawn. And I knew... I knew I can't make those movies any more. I can't make another piece of art that glorifies violence and bloodshed and brutality. I can't contribute another stone to this landslide of dehumanising rage that has swept across this country like a pestilence.

You said all along there's a fortune to be made in stories about life. The life force, the creation of life, the very instinct for living.

Claire: Mack, you think that I want that baby because l've got some hole in my life or I think I'm gonna have some hole in my life, but that's not it. Or if it is it, it's just a part of it. That baby needs someone to love it and take care of it.

Something has happened. You can't go back and have it not happen. Some kind of connection has been made. lt has to be played out.

What if these are miracles, Mack? Maybe we don't have any experience with miracles, so we're slow to recognise them.

Dee: I'm in love with a married man. We haven't been having an affair. He wouldn't do it. We just had one night together. One really amazing night. Do you think that's awful?
Officer: Which part?
Dee: All of it.
Officer: I think it happens.
Dee: When you love someone and they don't choose you, it's bad.

Dee, to Mack: I'm very happy for her, but it makes me feel like sh-t that you're out there finding her the love of her life and I'm here like what? I'm here like sh-t.

Mack: The thing is, it's so crazy out there, you gotta react really fast. If you're going, you've got a split second, otherwise the cross traffic will whack you.

Mack: Everything seems so close together. All the good and bad things in the world. Everything. I feel it in myself even. And in us. Our marriage. I love you, Claire. I like living my life with you.

Davis: There's a gulf in this country, an ever-widening abyss between people who have stuff and those who have sh-t. It's like this big hole has opened up in the ground, as big as the f-cking Grand Canyon. And what's come outta this big hole is an eruption of rage, and the rage creates violence and the violence is real. And it won't go away until someone changes something. Which is not gonna happen. And you may not like it. Even I may not like it. But I can't pretend it isn't there, because that is a lie. And when art lies, it becomes worthless, so I gotta keep telling the truth, even if it scares the sh-t outta me, like it scares the sh-t outta you. Even if it means some motherf-cker can blow a big old hole in my leg for a watch and I'm gonna walk with a f-cking limp for the rest of my life and count myself lucky. But there's so much rage going around we're damn lucky we have the movies to help us vent a little of it.

Mack: That line is so tired. I'm shocked you'd use it.

Davis: There's always been violence. There will always be violence, evil, and men with guns. My movies reflect what's going on. They don't make what's going on.

Davis: All of life's riddles are answered in the movies.

Simon, looking over the Grand Canyon: So what do you think?

Mack, looking over the Grand Canyon: I think... it's not all bad.