down the porch staircase. My sister was pacing in her gown having just finished pictures. It was all so lovely. And I still had nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I’ll admit that by this point I was slightly inebriated and completely panicked. And like any other time when I’ve been at a loss for words, I turned to my bank of movie knowledge for inspiration. I tried to remember famous quotes about love. Well-known, cheeky one-liners to get me through with a few chuckles while I BS’ed my way to the “I do’s.” But every line was too well-known. Clichéd. So expected.
So at the last minute, I decided to completely steal a speech from writer-director Joss Whedon’s Serenity (2005), a film about space cowboys fighting a bureaucratic government alliance between the US and China that had accidentally created roving space cannibals and were trying to cover it up. Oh, and it’s loosely based on the post-Civil War politics of the Wild West. “I’m a good brother,” I thought aloud as I scribbled the speech down between sips of my third vodka-laced juice.
And you know, I wasn’t far off. The speech went over so well that I had people asking me to write it down for them. “How did you come up with that speech?” my grandmother asked in awe. When I told her I hadn’t, but had stolen it from a character lovingly referred to as “Captain Tightpants”, first she looked confused, and then she shrugged. “You never know where something good will come from,” she said as she patted my cheek.
“It ain’t all buttons and charts, little albatross. You know what the first rule of flying is? Love. You can learn all the math in the ‘verse, but you take a boat in the air that you don’t love, she’ll shake you off as sure as the turn of the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she ought to fall down. Tells you she’s hurting before she keens. Makes her a home.”
—Capt. Malcom Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), Serenity (2005)
Years later, I would think about how right she was. “Anyone can cook” is the motto of Chef Gasteau in Disney/Pixar’s Ratatouille (2008), a motto that would clarified later by the infamous, tortured food critic, Anton Ego: “Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist can come from anywhere.” And so too great art and great inspiration can as well.
In this book, you may find an extremely famous and well-known quote or two. You may find some you know by heart, some you vaguely remember, and some you’d chosen to forget or had forgotten to remember. What you won’t find is a list of the greatest one-liners or famous quotes. This is not to say that any famous quotes are overrated or tired. Indeed, great writing and dialogue can stand any test, including time. But so often I find that the things the mean the most to us never wind up on any “best of” lists. Hopefully I’ve been able to capture some of those meaningful quotes that you adore within these pages.
So should any of you wonderful, creative, original, inventive readers out there need inspiration, I hope you find it here. This is for all the brothers searching for the words to christen the marriages of their sisters, and the grads trying to say goodbye to their classmates, and the coaches trying to inspire their team, and for those simply trying to get through the day. Which reminds me of my favorite movie quote of all time, as well as a continuing source of inspiration, from a Will Ferrell comedy no less:
“Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies. And, fortunately, when there aren’t any cookies, we can still find reassurance in a familiar hand on our skin, or a kind and loving gesture, or subtle encouragement, or a loving embrace, or an offer of comfort, not to mention hospital gurneys and nose plugs, an uneaten Danish, soft-spoken secrets, and Fender Stratocasters, and maybe the occasional piece of fiction. And we must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties, which we assume only accessorize our days, are effective for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives. I know the idea seems strange, but I also know that it just so happens to be true.”
—Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson),
Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
P.S. I strongly and unequivocally believe in the art of homage and adaptation. The quotes you will find laid out in this book are not meant to be delivered verbatim in any given speech. I encourage you: take them, mold them, adapt them; borrow, steal, and cheat them into something that works for you and your audience. Life’s too short to be beholden to dictated and curated speech.
Graduation: Grad Speeches & Parents’ Advice
“Well, what can I say? I graduated. It’s over; I did it. I know most of you are saying, ‘Hey, any idiot could do that.’ Well…it was tough for me, so BACK OFF!”
—Billy Madison (Adam Sandler), Billy Madison (1995)
And Billy was right. It is tough. Graduation is a time of celebration and reflection. Boys and girls become men and women. At least, according to the staple American rituals they do. In reality, we never really leave high school, and to our parents (and to ourselves, if we’re being honest), we never really grow up. There are still the politics of who’s sitting where and with whom from lunch shift in the school cafeteria to the break room at the office, though now rumors fly between cubicles instead of desks; and the issue of who is hooking up with whom is still a big deal (to HR, at any rate). But nonetheless, as teenagers we all still have to parade out onto the grass of the high school football stadium and prepare to march in front of our family and peers to collect our diplomas and get the hell out of there to get started in the “real world.”
To put it as mildly as possible, it’s effing difficult to try to encapsulate the entirety of adolescence into a single speech, both for grads and for parents. Sure, Richard Linklater was able to compress one boy’s adolescence into a single feature for Boyhood (2012), but it took him twelve years of filming, a year of editing, and three hours of narrative to do the trick. If you’re lucky, you’ve got five minutes. In order to make a lasting impression on either your classmates or your family, you’re going to need some firepower of the filmic variety.
Grads
Most of adolescent life is being told what to do. That’s part of growing up. Guidance, instruction, and education are the building blocks for your life going forward. Doesn’t mean they all don’t suck while you’re experiencing them. Of course, you still have a lot to learn, but that doesn’t mean you can’t drop some deeply profound wisdom bombs on the unsuspecting crowds gathered before you. You may not have seen any of these films, but when has not studying the material stopped you from completing your assignment?
“All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so.”
—Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw), Cloud Atlas (2012)
“Now…bring me that horizon.”
—Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), Pirates of the Caribbean:
Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)*
“We just get the one life, you know. Just one. You can’t live someone else’s
