My Night at Maud's - Conflicting Beliefs and Personal Pursuits
Jean-Louis:
My Christianity and my affairs are different, conflicting matters.
Vidal:
Yet they co-exist in you.
Jean-Louis:
In a warlike fashion. Now I may shock you once again but pursuing girls does not estrange one from God any more than pursing mathematics, for example.
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My Night at Maud's - Saintliness and Personal Choice in Conversation
Maud:
Don't you want to be a saint?
Jean-Louis:
Not at all.
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My Night at Maud's - Perspectives on Brief Romantic Encounters
Jean-Louis:
I shock you, I know. I've had affairs with girls I loved and thought of marrying. But I've never just slept with a girl; that simply doesn't appeal to me.
Vidal:
Yes, but let's suppose you met a lovely girl you knew you'd never see again. There are circumstances in which it's difficult to resist.
Jean-Louis:
Fate, I won't say God, has kept me from such circumstances. I was never lucky with brief encounters. Remarkably unlucky.
Vidal:
Just in that respect I have been lucky. Once in Italy with a Swedish girl. In Poland with an English girl. Those two nights are perhaps the happiest of my life. I'm all for affairs on journeys or at conferences. At least they avoid the clinging, bourgeois element.
Jean-Louis:
In principle, I'm against. But since such a thing never happened to me...
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My Night at Maud's - The Complexity of Love and Connections
Jean-Louis:
Ideally, one should never have to leave people. One shouldn't have to forget people. There should be one love, no other - not even platonic.
Maud:
Especially not platonic.
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My Night at Maud's - A Tense Moment of Vulnerability and Defiance
Maud:
Don't be childish. Lie beside me. Outside, or inside - if I'm not too repulsive.
Jean-Louis:
I'll take the armchair.
Maud:
You'll get a cramp. Are you afraid? Of yourself? Of me? I swear I won't touch you, and you I thought you had self-control.
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My Night at Maud's - Lessons in Morality from Women
Jean-Louis:
Women have taught me a lot, morally speaking. That sounds...
Maud:
A little vulgar.
Jean-Louis:
Yes. It would be silly to generalize about particular cases but each girl revealed a new moral problem which I had never faced up to before. It would be good for me to be shaken out of my moral lethargy.
Maud:
You could have ignored the physical aspect for the moral.
Jean-Louis:
Yes, but, the moral aspect would never have arisen if - Well, I know it's never impossible but the physical and moral are inseparable, let's face it.
Maud:
Perhaps it was the trick of the devil?
Jean-Louis:
Then I was caught. Yes, in a way, I was caught.
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My Night at Maud's - Complicated Relationships and Unspoken Desires
Vidal:
She's - very beautiful.
Jean-Louis:
Marry her.
Vidal:
No, we've gone into all that. We don't get on with each other, day in, day out. But we're the best of friends. I asked you to come because otherwise I know she and I will make love.
Jean-Louis:
I won't come.
Vidal:
But we would only do it to pass the time and that's no solution, for her or me. I'm a puritan, as you know.
Jean-Louis:
More than me?
Vidal:
Much more.
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My Night at Maud's - The Conflict Between Mathematics and Spirituality
Jean-Louis:
Mathematics distract from God. A useless, intellectual diversion - worse than other diversions.
Maud:
Why worse?
Jean-Louis:
Because its completely abstract and thus inhuman.
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My Night at Maud's - The Complexity of Conditional Love
Maud:
What I have against you is your lack of spontaneity.
Jean-Louis:
I open my heart to you. What more do you want?
Maud:
I don't like your love with conditions attached.
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My Night at Maud's - Cold Lips, Cold Feelings
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My Night at Maud's - Challenging Conventional Relationships and Respectability
Maud:
You do shock me.
Jean-Louis:
So you've said.
Maud:
You're the most outrageous person I've met. Religion has always left me cold. I'm neither for nor against it. But people like you prevent me from taking it seriously. All that really concerns you is your respectability. Staying in a woman's room after midnight is dreadful. It would never occur to you to stay because I'm lonely. To establish a slightly less conventional relationship even if we should never meet again. This I find stupid - very stupid and not very Christian.
Jean-Louis:
It's nothing to do with religion. I just thought you might be tired.
Maud:
Do you still think so?
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My Night at Maud's - The Dilemma of Meaning and Hope
Jean-Louis:
Are you still a Marxist?
Vidal: [[w:Pascal's wager|Pascal's wager]
Absolutely. For a Communist, ] is very relevant today. Personally, I very much doubt that history has any meaning. Yet I wager that it has, so I'm in a Pascalian situation. Hypothesis A: Society and politics are meaningless. Hypothesis B: History has meaning. I'm not at all sure B is more likely to be true than A. More likely the reverse. Let's even suppose B has a 10% chance of being true and A has 90%. Nevertheless I have no choice but to opt for B, because only the hypothesis that history has meaning allows me to go on living. Suppose I bet on A, and B was true, despite the lesser odds. I'd have thrown away my life. So I must choose B to justify my life and actions. There's an 90% chance I'm wrong but that doesn't matter.
Jean-Louis:
Mathematical hope. Potential gain divided by probability. With your hypothesis B, though the probability is slight, the possible gain is infinite. In your case, a meaning to life. In Pascal's, eternal salvation.
Vidal: [[Maxim Gorky|Gorky; [Lenin; [Vladimir Mayakovsky|Mayakovsky; [Russian Revolution|Russian revolution]
It was ], ] or maybe ] who said about the ] that the situation forced them to choose the one chance in a thousand. Because hope became infinitely greater if you took that chance than if you didn't take it.
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My Night at Maud's - Unexpected Encounters in Unfamiliar Places
Jean-Louis:
You come here a lot?
Vidal:
Almost never. And you?
Jean-Louis:
I've never set foot in here before.
Vidal:
And yet our paths cross right here. How strange.
Jean-Louis:
On the contrary. Our ordinary paths never cross. Therefore, the point of intersection must be outside those ordinary paths. I've been dabbling in mathematics in my spare time. It would be fun to calculate our chances of meeting in a two-month period.
Vidal:
Can it be done?
Jean-Louis:
It's a matter of data and how you handle it. Provided the data exists. Obviously, if I don't know where a person lives or works I can't work out the odds of running into them.
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My Night at Maud's - The Importance of Purity Over Judgment
Jean-Louis:
Although it's less enforced now, one thing I dislike about the Church is balancing sins against good deeds. Purity of heart is more important.
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My Night at Maud's - The Importance of Acknowledging Goodness
Jean-Louis:
As a Christian I say it's evil not to acknowledge what is good.
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My Night at Maud's - The Nature of Shared Love and Predestination
Jean-Louis:
There can't be real love unless it's shared. That's why I believe in a certain predestination.
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My Night at Maud's - The Interconnection of Love and Religion
Jean-Louis:
Religion adds to love, but love adds to religion, also.
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My Night at Maud's - The Paradox of Temporary Happiness
Jean-Louis:
I'm happy around you. If I'm happy with you, it's because we'll never meet again. The thought of the future needn't depress us, since we have none.
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Z - Accusations of Communism and Class Struggles
Examining Magistrate:
You're a Communist.
Vago:
Me?
Examining Magistrate:
You and Yago. You're friends. It was something you let slip out: "A rich man catches a cold, we poor still have to work or we die." Then you caught yourself and stopped.
Vago:
I hate Communists!
Examining Magistrate:
Not words. I want proof! Only a Communist would say that.
Vago:
I belong to an anti-Communist group!
Examining Magistrate:
And Yago?
Vago:
Yago too.
Examining Magistrate:
Which one?
Vago:
CROC! Christian Royalist Organization against Communism.
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Z - Criminal History Revealed in Courtroom Exchange
Examining Magistrate:
Any convictions?
Vago:
Yes, four.
Examining Magistrate:
Four?
Vago:
Yes, four. Illegal possession of a weapon, abuse and slander, theft - and rape.
Examining Magistrate:
Rape?
Vago:
It wasn't really. I was a Boy Scout camp counselor.
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Z - A General's Alibi on the Day of Murder
Examining Magistrate:
What did you do the day of the murder?
The General:
I'd decided to attend the Bolshoi. Not out of love for dance. I'm no pervert, thank God. But it was a chance to spot sympathizers.
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Z - Inevitability and Accountability in Law
Attorney General:
So you'd indict the chiefs of police and security?
Examining Magistrate:
It's inevitable.
Attorney General:
Only events dictated by divine will are inevitable.
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Three Colors: Red - Dreams and Memories in Silent Reflection
Valentine: [[dreams; [true]
Do your ] come ]?
The Judge:
It's been years since I dreamt something nice.
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Three Colors: Red - Confrontation Between Valentine and The Judge
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Amour - The Weight of Shared Suffering
Anne:
There's no point in going on living. That's how it is. I know it can only get worse. Why should I inflict this on us, on you and me?
Georges:
You're not inflicting anything on me.
Anne:
You don't have to lie, Georges.
Georges: [looks down at the floor contemplatively]
Put yourself in my place. Didn't you ever think that it could happen to me, too?
Anne:
Of course I did. But imagination and reality have little in common.
Georges:
But things are getting better every day.
Anne:
I don't want to carry on. You're making such sweet efforts to make everything easier for me. But I don't want to go on. For my own sake, not yours.
Georges:
I don't believe you. I know you. You think you are a burden to me. But what would you do in my place?
Anne:
I don't want to rack my brain over this. I'm tired, I want to go to bed.
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Amour - Reflections on Life and Legacy
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Amour - The Power of Storytelling and Emotion
Georges: [telling a childhood memory]
... some banal romance or other about a nobleman and a lower middle-class girl who couldn't have each other and who then, out of sheer magnanimity, decide to renounce their love - in fact, I don't quite remember it any more. In any case, afterwards I was thoroughly distraught, and it took me a bit of time to calm down. In the courtyard of the house where grandma lived, there was a young guy at the window who asked me where I'd been. He was a couple of years older than me, a braggart who really impressed me. "To the movies", I said, because I was proud that my grandma had given me the money to go all alone to the cinema. "What did you see?". I started to tell him the story of the movie, and as I did, all the emotion came back. I didn't want to cry in front of the boy, but it was impossible; there I was, crying out loud in the courtyard, and I told him the whole drama to the bitter end.
Anne:
So? How did he react?
Georges:
No idea. He probably found it amusing. I don't remember. I don't remember the film either. But I remember the feeling. That I was ashamed of crying, but that telling him the story made all my feelings and tears come back, almost more powerfully than when I was actually watching the film, and that I just couldn't stop.
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