Terry Alexander Quotes

Flip [news vendor] Water main broke all the way up on 40th Street and 7th Avenue. They say the subway's a damn river.

Jerry Strange.

Flip What's up, Jerry? What you thinking?

Jerry Well... water mains don't usually break unless it's wintertime. The, uh, pipes burst open because it's cold. And.. it's only the First of October.

Flip Reminds me of life in the Delta.

Jerry Yeah. Mississippi, all right.

Flip Mekong, my friend. Mekong.

Jerry Hey, Flip... did I ever tell you that the whole Vietnam War was fought over a bet that Howard Hughes lost to Aristotle Onassis?

Pvt. Miller You find anything?

John Yeah. Prime real estate at close-out prices!

John We don't believe in what you're doing here, Sarah. Hey, you know what they keep down here in this cave? Man, they got the books and the records of the top 100 companies. They got the Defense Department budget down here. And they got the negatives for all your favorite movies. They got microfilm with tax return and newspaper stories. They got immigration records, census reports, and they got the accounts of all the wars and plane crashes and volcano eruptions and earthquakes and fires and floods and all the other disasters that interrupted the flow of things in the good ole U.S. of A. Now what does it matter, Sarah darling? All this filing and record keeping? We ever gonna give a shit? We even gonna get a chance to see it all? This is a great, big 14 mile TOMBSTONE! with an epitaph on it that nobody gonna bother to read. Now, here you come. Here you come with a whole new set of charts and graphs and records. What you gonna do? Bury them down here with all the other relics of what... once... was? Let me tell you what else. Yeah, I'm gonna tell you what else. You ain't never gonna figure it out, just like they never figured out why the stars are where they're at. It ain't mankind's job to figure that stuff out. So what you're doing is a waste of time, Sarah. And time is all we got left, you know. Shame on you. There's plenty to do. Plenty to do, so long as there's you and me and maybe some other people. We could start over, start fresh, get some babies and teach em, Sarah, teach em never to come over here and dig these records out. You want to put some kind of explanation down here before you leave? Here's one as good as any you're likely to find. We've been punished by the Creator. He visited a curse on us. So we might get a look at... what hell was like. Maybe didn't want to see us blow ourselves up and put a big hole in the sky... maybe He just wanted to show us He was still the bossman. Maybe He figured we was getting too big for our britches... trying to figure His shit out.