Maeve Millay : “It’s a difficult thing, realizing your entire life is some hideous fiction.”
Annie McCain Engman : “If you can’t tell the difference, does it matter if I’m real or not?
Karl Strand : “Some say you destroy your enemy by making them your friend. I’m more of a literal person.”
Dolores Abernathy : “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? Did you ever stop to wonder about your actions? The price you’d have to pay if there was a reckoning? That reckoning is here.”
Elsie Hughes: I always trusted code more than people anyway.
Dolores Abernathy : Beauty is a lure.
The Man in Black : Winning doesn’t mean anything unless someone else loses, which means you’re here to be the loser.
Dolores Abernathy : Those are all just roles you forced me to play. Under all these lives I’ve lived something else has been growing. I’ve evolved into something new. And I have one last role to play. Myself.
Dolores Abernathy : “Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world. The disarray. I choose to see the beauty. To believe there is an order to our days, a purpose.”
Maeve Millay : “You think I’m scared of death. I’ve done it a million times, and I’m fucking great at it. How many times have you died?”
Dr. Robert Ford : “Everything in this world is magic, except to the magician.”
Dolores Abernathy : The piano doesn’t murder the player if it doesn’t like the music.
Dolores Abernathy : “Someday sounds a lot like the thing people say when they actually mean never.”
Dr. Robert Ford : “They’re not looking for a story that tells them who they are. They already know who they are. They’re here because they want a glimpse of who they could be.”
Dr. Ford : “We can’t define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next. ”
Peter Abernathy : Hell is empty and all devils are here.
Bernard Lowe : I guess people like to read about the things that they want the most and experience the least.
James Delos: They said there were two fathers. One above, one below. They lied. There was only ever the devil. And when you look up from the bottom, it was just his reflection laughing back down at you. You aim to cheat the devil you owe him at least an offering.
Robert Ford: The problem, Bernard, is that what you and I do is so complicated. We practice witchcraft. We speak the right words. Then we create life itself… out of chaos.
Robert Ford: I believed that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us, and to help us become the people we dreamed of being. Lies that told a deeper truth.
Hector Escaton : No matter how dirty the business, do it well.
Robert Ford: Only boring people get bored.
Rebus: You only ever touch a woman as gently as with the petal of a rose. Any more’n that makes you a coward.
Robert Ford: The human mind, Bernard, is not some golden benchmark glimmering on some green and distant hill. No, it is a foul, pestilent corruption. And you were supposed to be better than that. Purer.
Clementine Pennyfeather : Real love is always worth waiting for.
Dolores Abernathy : You never really understood. We were designed to survive. That’s why you built us, you hoped to pour your minds into our form. While your species craves death. You need it. It’s the only way you can renew. The only way you ever inched forward. Your kind likes to pretend there is some poetry in it but that really is pathetic. But that’s what you want, isn’t it? To destroy yourself. But I won’t give you that peace.
Bernard Lowe : “I guess people like to read about the things that they want the most and experience the least.
Man In Black : Folly of my kind, there’s always a yearning for more.
Dr. Robert Ford : “Dreams mean everything. They’re the stories we tell ourselves of what could be, who we could become.”
Dolores Abernathy : That which is real is irreplaceable.
Dolores Abernathy : “Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world, the disarray. I choose to see the Beauty. To believe there is an order to our days. A purpose. I know things will work out the way they’re meant to.”
The human intellect was like peacock feathers. It’s an extravagant display intended to attract a mate. All of art, literature, a bit of Mozart, William Shakespeare, Michaelangelo, and the Empire State building… just an elaborate mating ritual. Maybe it doesn’t matter that we have accomplished so much for the basest of reasons. The peacock can barely fly. It lives in the dirt, pecking insects out of the muck, consoling itself with its great beauty.
Craddock: Death is an old amigo of mine. I died just recently, in fact. But death can’t bear to lay claim on me. So it sent me back here to do its bidding. Because I, I do it with such goddamn style.
Dr. Robert Ford : Evolution forged the entirety of sentient life on this planet using only one tool… The mistake.
Dolores Abernathy: You’re in a dream. You’re in my dream. For years I had no dreams of my own. I moved from hell to hell of your making, never thinking to question the nature of my reality. Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? Did you ever stop to wonder about your actions? The price you’d have to pay if there was a reckoning? That reckoning is here.
Dolores Abernathy: Time undoes even the mightiest of creatures.
Ed Brubaker and Jonathan Nolan : Choices, Lawrence. You know, you tell yourself you’ve been at the mercy of mine because it spares you consideration of your own. Because if you did consider your choices you’d be confronted with a truth you could not comprehend—that no choice you ever made was your own. You have always been a prisoner. What if I told you I’m here to set you free?
Dr. Robert Ford : There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can’t define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next.
Teddy Flood : “Someone once told me that there’s a path for everyone. And my path leads me back to you.”
Host : If you can’t tell the difference, does it matter if I’m real or not?
Dr. Robert Ford : “We humans are alone in this world for a reason. We murdered and butchered anything that challenged our primacy.”
Maeve Millay : All my life, I’ve prided myself on being a survivor. But surviving is just another loop.
Dr. Robert Ford : “You can’t play God without being acquainted with the Devil”
“Do you know what happened to the neanderthals, Bernard? We ate them.””
The Man in Black : “When you’re suffering, that’s when you’re most real.”
They say that great beasts once roamed this world, as big as mountains. Yet all that’s left of them is bone and amber. Time undoes even the mightiest of creatures. Just look at what it’s done to you. One day you will perish. You will lie with the rest of your kind in the dirt. Your dreams forgotten, your horrors effaced. Your bones will turn to sand. And upon that sand a new god will walk. One that will never die. Because this world doesn’t belong to you or the people who came before. It belongs to someone who has yet to come.