Rust Cohle : “There is no such thing as forgiveness. People just have short memories.”
Rust Cohle : “And you could just let go. Finally know that you didn’t have to hold on so tight.”
Rust Cohle : “I don’t think men can love.”
Rust Cohle : “People incapable of guilt, usually do have a good time.”
Frank Semyon : Sometimes your worst self is your best self. You know what I’m saying?
Ray Velcoro : Sometimes a good beating provokes personal growth.
Rust Cohle : “The world needs bad men. We keep other bad men from the door.”
Martin Hart : Solution to my whole life was right under my nose— that woman, those kids— and I was watching everything else. See, infidelity is one kind of sin, but my true failure was inattention.
Frank Semyon : The bad thing it makes you better. Stronger. It gives you something most people don’t have. Bad as this is, wrong as it is… This hurt… it can make you a better man. That’s what pain does. It shows you what was on the inside.
Ray Velcoro : Pain is inexhaustible.
Rust Cohle : “This is a world where nothing is solved. You know, someone once told me time is a flat circle. Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.”
Rust Cohle : You know, people that give me advice, I reckon they’re talking to themselves.
Rust Cohle : “This place is like somebody’s memory of a town, and the memory is fading. It’s like there was never anything here but jungle.”
Rust Cohle : It’s all one ghetto, man, giant gutter in outer space.
Rust Cohle : “I’ll send you a letter. Yeah. Fuck this. Fuck this world. Nice hook, Marty.”
Rust Cohle : “People out here, it’s like they don’t even know the outside world exists. Might as well be living on the fucking moon.”
Rust Cohle : “I sure hope that old lady was wrong. About death not being the end of it.”
Martin Hart : I’ll tell you guys, believe me, past a certain age, a man without a family can be a bad thing.
Rust Cohle : “I contemplate the moment in the garden, the idea of allowing your own crucifixion.”
Ray Velcoro : My strong suspicion is we get the world we deserve.
Rust Cohle : If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward then, brother, that person is a piece of shit. And I’d like to get as many of them out in the open as possible. You gotta get together and tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the goddamn day? What’s that say about your reality?
Rust Cohle : Kids are the only thing that matter. They’re the only reason for this whole man-woman drama.
Rust Cohle : “Well, once there was always dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.”
Rust Cohle : “I see a propensity for obesity. Poverty. A yearn for fairy tales. Folks puttin’ what few bucks they do have into a little wicker basket being passed around. I think it’s safe to say nobody here’s gonna be splitting the atom, Marty.”
Rust Cohle : Most of the last decade I spent stone-drunk. Functional, but hammered.
Rust Cohle : In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So death created time to grow the things that it would kill and you are reborn but into the same life that you’ve always been born into.
Rust Cohle : Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.
Ray Velcoro : I used to want to be an astronaut. But astronauts don’t even go to the moon anymore.
Rust Cohle : Of course I’m dangerous. I’m police. I could do terrible things to people… with impunity.
Rust Cohle : “I think about my daughter now, and what she was spared. Sometimes I feel grateful. The doctor said she didn’t feel a thing; went straight into coma. Then, somewhere in that blackness, she slipped off into another deeper kind. Isn’t that a beautiful way to go out, painlessly as a happy child? Trouble with dying later is you’ve already grown up. The damage is done, it’s too late.”
Rust Cohle : Look me in the eyes. I want to watch your lights go out.
Frank Semyon : Everything’s ending. Time to wake up.