I'm Not There (2007) - Quotes

The Complexity of Traditional Music

Jude: Doesn't really matter, you know, what kind of nasty names people invent for the music. But, uh, folk music is just a word, you know, that I can't use anymore. What I'm talking about is traditional music, right, which is to say it's mathematical music, it's based on hexagons. But all these songs about, you know, roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans are turning into angels – I mean, you know, they're not going to die. They're not folk music songs. They're political songs. They're already dead. You'd think that these traditional music people would – would gather that mystery, you know, is a traditional fact, you know, seeing as they're all so full of mystery.

Keenan Jones: And contradictions.

Jude: Yeah, contradictions.

Keenan Jones: And chaos.

Jude: Yes, it's chaos, clocks, and watermelons – you know, it's – it's everything. These people actually think I have some kind of, uh, fantastic imagination. It gets very, uh … lonesome. But traditional music is just, uh … it's too unreal to die. It doesn't need to be protected. You know, I mean, in that music is the only true valid death you can feel today, you know, off a record player. But like everything else in great demand, people try to own it. Has to do with, like, uh, the purity thing. I think its meaninglessness is holy. Everybody knows I'm not a folk singer.

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Exploring Emotions in Human Experience

Jude: Feeling deeply, that's what this is about? What precisely, please do tell, am I supposed to be feeling, huh?

Keenan Jones: I'm simply referring to standard emotions – pain, remorse, love.

Jude: Yeah, I have none of those feelings.

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Exploring the Center of One's World

Claire: I would like to know what is at the center of your world.

Robbie: Center of my world? Wow, you're not monkeyin around.

Claire: Why? It's very simple, this question.

Robbie: Hm, well, I'm 22. I guess I would say me.

Claire: I suppose you are honest.

Robbie: Don't you think that you're the center or that you should be the center? Thinking with your own head, talking with your own mouth?

Claire: Yes, but there are things in the world, too, that are important.

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End of War and Personal Reflections

President Nixon: [trails off] I have asked for this radio and television time tonight for the purpose of announcing that we today have concluded an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam and in southeast Asia. The following statement is being issued at this moment in Washington and Hanoi: At 12:30 Paris time today, January 23, 1973 …

Robbie: That's when she knew it was over for good. The longest running war in television history. The war that hung like a shadow over the same nine years as her marriage. So why was it suddenly so hard to breathe?

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Perception of Age and Identity

Hobo: Coulda sworn you was an older man.

Woody: Well, I used to be. Much older.

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Sleep and Dreamers: A Conversation on Rest

Jude: Whoa, look at all these medicines! Hey man, what are those?

Man at Party: Mandy's, make you sleep.

Jude: Sleep? I don't need sleep. Sleep is for dreamers.

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Jude's One-Word Response to Fans

Reporter: Jude! One word for your fans?

Jude: Ocelot.

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Time's Overlapping Presence and Its Possibilities

Billy the Kid: It's like you got yesterday, today and tomorrow, all in the same room. There's no telling what can happen.

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The Complexity of Identity and Freedom

Billy the Kid: People are always talking about freedom. Freedom to live a certain way, without being kicked around. Course, the more you live a certain way, the less it feel like freedom. Me, I can change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else. I don't know who I am most of the time.

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Disillusionment with a Dreamed Film Project

Robbie Clark: Grain of Sand would become the underground hit of 1965 and Robbie Clark the new James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Jack Kerouac all rolled into one. But the movie disappointed her. The more they tried to make it youthful, the more the energies on screen seemed out of date. It wasn't the film they had dreamed, the film they had imagined and discussed. The film they each wanted to live.

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Ready to Listen and Embrace Life

Robbie Clark: New York, August 7 of 1964. Congress grants President Johnson complete authority over the war while she studies painting at Cooper Union and he completes dubbing on his first major film. She tells him she's sure it will be a hit. And the cats across the roof, mad in love, scream into drainpipes. And it's I who am ready, ready to listen. Never tired, never sad, never guilty.

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The Burden of Unmet Expectations

Jack Rollins: It's a fierce sort of feeling, thinking something is expected of you but you don't know exactly what it is. Brings forth a weird kind of guilt.

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Limitations of Artistic Expression

Jack Rollins: All they want from me is finger-pointin songs. I only got ten fingers.

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Conflict with Nature and the Power of Dreams

Arthur Rimbaud: I know I have a sickness festering somewhere. I don't mean like Woody Guthrie, wasting away in some hospital. I couldn't do that, decay like that. That's nature's will, and I'm against nature. I don't dig nature at all. The only truly natural things are dreams, which nature cannot touch with decay.

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The Essence of Being a Poet

Arthur Rimbaud: You don't have to write anything down to be a poet. Some work in gas stations. Some shine shoes. I don't really call myself one because I don't like the word. Me? I'm a trapeze artist. Sighting it and hearing it and breathing it in; rubbing it all in the pores of my skin. And the wind between my eyes, milk and honey in my comb.

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Struggles of Creativity and Despair

Arthur Rimbaud: [[Woody Guthrie; [Little Richard] ] was dead, ] was becoming a preacher, so whether you're a folksinger or a Christian, rock n roll was the devil. Me? I was in a ditch, up a cliff, out of step, ready to quit. I wrote the kind of stuff you write when you have no place to live and you're wrapped up in the fire pump. I nearly killed myself with pity and despair. And then I wrote it. It was like swimming in lava. Skipping, kicking, catching a nail with your foot. Seeing your victim hanging from a tree.

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