The Locked Room

True Detective 1×3

& Marty: Not everybody want to sit alone in a empty room beating off to murder manuals. Some folks enjoy community, the common good.
    Rust: Yeah? Well, if the common good has got to make up fairy tales, then it’s not good for anybody.

& Marty: I see a lot of joy out there. I mean, can you imagine if people didn’t believe, what things they’d get up to?
    Rust: Exact same thing they do now, just out in the open.
    Marty: Bull... shit. It’d be a fucking freak show of murder and debauchery, and you know it.
    Rust: If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then, brother, that person is a piece of shit, and I’d like to get as many of them out in the open as possible.

& Marty: I guess your judgment is infallible piece-of-shitwise.

& Rust: Certain linguistic anthropologists think that religion is a language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain, dulls critical thinking.
    Marty: Well, I don’t use $10 words as much as you, but for a guy who sees no point in existence, you sure fret about it an awful lot, and you still sound panicked.
    Rust: At least I’m not racing to a red light.

& Rust: The ontological fallacy of expecting a light at the end of the tunnel, well, that’s what the preacher sells, same as a shrink. See, the preacher, he encourages your capacity for illusion. Then he tells you it’s a fucking virtue. Always a buck to be had doing that, and it’s such a desperate sense of entitlement, isn’t it? “Surely, this is all for me. Me. Me, me, me. I, I. I’m so fucking important. I’m so fucking important, then, right?” Fuck you!

& Marty: You know the real difference between you and me?
    Rust: Yeah. Denial.
    Marty: The difference is that I know the difference between an idea and a fact. You are incapable of admitting doubt. Now, that sounds like denial to me.
    Rust: I doubt that.

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& Maggie: I’m thinking people don’t really change at all, not who they are at heart.

& Marty: I get to feeling like— Look. I can see 40... and it’s like I’m that coyote in the cartoons, like I’m running off a cliff, and if I don’t look down and keep running, I might be fine, but, um... I think I’m all fucked up.

& Rust: I guess it’s a skill. Most times, you don’t even need that. You just look them in the eyes. The whole story is right there. Everybody wears their hunger and their haunt, you know? You just got to be honest about what can go on up here... a locked room.... but then again, I’m terrible at cards.

& Rust: People... I’ve seen the finale of thousands of lives, man— young, old. Each one is so sure of their realness, that their sensory experience constituted a unique individual with purpose, meaning... so certain that they were more than a biological puppet. Well, the truth wills out, and everybody sees once the strings are cut, all fall down.
Ω Depressing, huh? There’s no exit. At all. For everyone.

& Jennifer: So what’s Alaska like?
    Rust: It’s beautiful. It’s not Paris, but it’s clean, and it’s clear.

& Jennifer: What’d you do in Paris?
    Rust: Mainly just got drunk in front of Notre Dame.

& Rust: ...Each stilled body so certain that they were more than the sum of their urges, all the useless spinning, tired mind, collision of desire and ignorance.

& Maggie: I think you guys would be good together if you gave it a chance. You guys don’t give things chances. I don’t know why that is.
    Rust: That’s because we know what we want and we don’t mind being alone.

& Marty: Think a man can love two women at once, I mean, be in love with them?
    Rust: I don’t think that man can love, at least not the way that he means. Inadequacies of reality always set in.

& Marty: Do you wonder ever if you’re a bad man?
    Rust: No. I don’t wonder, Marty. World needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door.
Ω Such a philosopher.

& Marty: What can I say? I thought for a minute, you just liked looking at pictures of dead people.

& Marty: You ever been in a gunfight?
    Det. Papania: No.
    Marty: Well, then how the fuck you gonna know what I’m talking about?

& Rust: In that last nanosecond, they saw what they were, that you, yourself, this whole big drama, it was never anything but a jerry-rig of presumption and dumb will and you could just let go finally now that you didn’t have to hold on so tight... to realize that all your life— you know, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain— it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream, a dream that you had... inside a locked room, a dream about being a person...... and like a lot of dreams... there’s a monster at the end of it.

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+ quotes on the IMDb

Σ Pufff. Piece of art. For real.