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People share the most 'unexpectedly profound' quote they've ever heard in a movie

"In a mad world, only the mad are sane."

Photo Credit: Canva

A group of friends enjoys a funny movie at the theater.

There are certain movies that simply command your attention. For some, it's all about the sound designer, who may create explosive car chases that are loud and fiery. For others, it might be the work of the cinematographer, framing green, rolling hills below a buttery sunset. For me, and many others, what brings the most magic to film is the words brought to us by the screenwriters. Obviously, a masterful director—and brilliant actors—pull all of these elements together to create a near-perfect cinematic experience.

Some dialogue from screenplays just hits like a ton of bricks. And if it hits at the right time, it might just stay embedded in your mind forever, possibly even transforming your life. One that I've carried with me is from the 1950s film Harvey starring Jimmy Stewart. "In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years, I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me."

-Jimmy Stewart in the film Harvey. www.youtube.com, Bhana Prasad M, Universal Pictures

Oftentimes, the movie itself doesn’t have to be an A+ for the line to be stellar. A lesser James L. Brooks film, How Do You Know, gave us another profound favorite movie line, delivered by Paul Rudd: "We are all just one small adjustment away from making our lives work." I think about that quote nearly every day.

The art of writing screenplays is a delicate and nuanced endeavor. In fact, just recently, writer Ken Miyamoto listed "15 Movies Screenwriters Should Watch to Study Dialogue," in an article for ScreenRant in which he insists there are no real secrets. It either works or it doesn't, and it mostly depends on how relatable it is. A few of the movies he lists include Annie Hall, The Social Network, Good Will Hunting, and Glengarry Glen Ross. (Three of those screenwriters—Woody Allen, Aaron Sorkin, and David Mamet—are also playwrights, which could offer a clue as to why their work is so reliant on dialogue, alone.)

On a Reddit post, someone asked, "What's the most unexpectedly profound quote you've ever heard in a movie?" The OP adds, "I was watching a movie the other day, and a line of dialogue just hit me harder than I expected. It got me thinking about how certain quotes from films can stick with you for years. What’s a quote from a movie that really resonated with you or made you think differently about something?"

The question got over one thousand replies. They varied in tone from deeply meaningful and thought-provoking to just plain funny. Here are a few that stood out, mixed in with a few favorites of my own.

PROFOUND:

"The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you are uncool." – Almost Famous

"It's not who you are underneath, but what you do that defines you." – Batman Begins

"In a mad world, only the mad are sane." -- Ran (Kurosawa)

"We just don’t recognize life’s most significant moments while they’re happening. Back then I thought, 'Well, there’ll be other days.' I didn’t realize that that was the only day." – Field of Dreams

"Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light." – Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban

"Make the money, don't let the money make you." -- The Players Club

"It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything." – Fight Club

"I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it" -- The Color Purple"

"Life is pain, highness. Anyone that tells you otherwise is selling something." – The Princess Bride

"Life is pain" scene from the film The Princess Bride www.youtube.com, JM Lam, 20th Century Fox


HUMOROUS:

"Look up idiot in the dictionary, you know what you'll find?" "A picture of me?" "No, the definition of the word idiot, which you f-ing are." – Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

"Worrying is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do but it doesn't get you anywhere." – Van Wilder

"Nervous?" "Yes." "First time?" "No, I've been nervous lots of times." – Airplane

"That is one nutty hospital." – Tootsie

"You're never too old to go to space camp." – Stranger Than Fiction

"It must be nice always thinking you know better, to think you’re the smartest person in the room." "No, it's awful." – Broadcast News

Holly Hunter in Broadcast News. www.youtube.com, 20th Century Fox, Michael Stevenson

SCI-FI:

"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain" - Blade Runner

"Watch the skies, everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies." -- The Thing from Another World

“I just try to live every day as if I’ve deliberately come back to this one day to enjoy it as if it was the full final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life.” - About Time"

"Do or do not. There is no try." – The Empire Strikes Back

- YouTube www.youtube.com, Empire Fan Productions


CLASSIC:

"It ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward." – Rocky Balboa (2006)

"Get busy living, or get busy dying." – The Shawshank Redemption

"I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen." – Say Anything

"When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible." __ When Harry Met Sally

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." – Ferris Bueller's Day Off


Matthew Broderick stars as Ferris Bueller. www.youtube.com, Paramount Pictures, Maximus Operandi



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Legendary writer Kurt Vonnegut cleverly explains how to write the 3 stories everyone loves

Notice anything similar?

via David Comburg/YouTube

Kurt Vonnegut explains the shapes of stories.

To be a great fiction writer requires understanding basic story structures and being clever enough to disguise them so your audience doesn’t know they’re watching or reading something they’ve seen before. Academics suggest that there are only a finite number of plots and structures, but that number varies based on who’s doing the talking.

Writer Kurt Vonnegut, best known for his satirical works on American politics and culture, including “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “Sirens of Titan,” was obsessed with the shapes of stories and summed up his views in one powerful sentence: “The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.”

In the video below, Vonnegut explains why the shapes of three different types of stories, from “person gets into trouble” to “boy meets girl” to “Cinderella,” can all be summed up on two axes: the Y represents good and bad fortune, the X represents the beginning and end of a story.

The first question is where the main character or protagonist starts their journey. Are they in a state of good or bad fortune, and how does that change from beginning to end?

“Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it,” Vonnegut says with a smirk.

The video is an intriguing look into the mind of a highly original writer and gives excellent insights into the basics of storytelling.

This article originally appeared two years ago.

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Ever heard of 'The Tiffany Problem'? Why people think historically accurate things are wrong.

It's a strange but real dilemma for storytellers.

Ali Shaker/VOA, Tylwyth Eldar/Wikimedia Commons

The name Tiffany goes way back to Tiphaine Raguenel, who lived in Mont Saint Michel in the 1300s.

Depending on what generation you belong to, when you hear the name Tiffany, you might think of the famous jewelry store, the teen singer from the 80s or the less-in-the-spotlight daughter of the former president. Most likely, you don't think of a woman who lived in the Middle Ages.

In fact, if you were listening to an audiobook set in medieval times and the narrator introduced a character named Tiffany, you'd probably get yanked right out of the story as your brain would say, "Wait, why is there a Tiffany in this story? Isn't that a much more modern name?"

It's actually not, which is exactly why The Tiffany Problem is called The Tiffany Problem.

The Tiffany Problem refers to the fact that people in modern times will sometimes see something as anachronistic when it's not. It's something writers, filmmakers and other storytellers have to be aware of, as it can feel like there's a historical problem even if there isn't an actual historical problem.

Abraham Piper explains the dilemma and how it was coined:

As Piper shares, fantasy author Jo Walton coined the term "The Tiffany Problem" and explained it:

"Your readers are modern people and know what they know, which is fine except when what they know isn’t actually right. For instance, the name Tiffany sounds extremely modern to us. It feels jarring when we read it as a character name in a historical setting, where we’d be quite happy with names like Anna and Jane. But our instinct is wrong, because Tiffany is a form of Theophania, and it was fairly common in medieval England and France. It went out of fashion later, and it’s because we don’t have seventeenth to nineteenth century examples that it feels modern. But you still can’t use it in a fantasy novel set in the exact time and place when the name would have been historically accurate, because it will jerk the reader out of their reading trance. They know it’s wrong and you can’t tell them that what they know is wrong."

Piper had also shared that "ha ha," which seems like a casual, modern colloquialism, is actually very old, with the first known use coming from a monk 1,000 years ago. He also mentions "OMG," which was used by a World War I admiral in a letter to Winston Churchill in 1917. And "hubby" as a slang term for husband? That goes way back to the 1680s. Who knew?

It's a bit ironic that writers who strive to ensure their historical fiction works are historically accurate can find themselves stymied by people being just flat-out wrong about what's accurate and what's not. Humans are interesting creatures, aren't we?

For more info about the name Tiffany than you ever thought you wanted to know but will be delighted to learn, CGP Grey created a whole video about the name that has 4.7 million views. Tiffany exploded the 1980s, but CGP Grey goes all the way back to the year 300 to uncover the origins of the name. It's genuinely entertaining. Watch:

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

If you're still here and want to take an even deeper dive into the history of Tiffany, this other video from CGP Grey is an incredible rabbit hole that will make you appreciate the work historians do and marvel at how much digging Grey actually did to provide the original Tiffany history video. We're talking trips to the deep dark corners of The British Library, the largest library in the world, and hours and hours of paging through books just to find the original source of this one poem that includes the name "Tiffany." It's a journey, but a fascinating one.

Enjoy "Someone Dead Ruined My Life… Again":

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

This article originally appeared last year.

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A boy told his teacher she can't understand him because she's white. Her response is on point.

'Be the teacher America's children of color deserve, because we, the teachers, are responsible for instilling empathy and understanding in the hearts of all kids. We are responsible for the future of this country.'

Photo by John Pike. Used with permission.

Emily E. Smith is no ordinary teacher.

Fifth-grade teacher Emily E. Smith is not your ordinary teacher. She founded The Hive Society — a classroom that's all about inspiring children to learn more about their world ... and themselves — by interacting with literature and current events. Students watch TED talks, read Rolling Stone, and analyze infographics.

She even has a long-distance running club to encourage students to take care of their minds and bodies. Smith is such an awesome teacher, in fact, that she recently received the 2015 Donald H. Graves Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Writing.

It had always been her dream to work with children in urban areas, so when Smith started teaching, she hit the ground running. She had her students making podcasts, and they had in-depth discussions about their readings on a cozy carpet.

But in her acceptance speech for her award, she made it clear that it took a turning point in her career before she really got it:

"Things changed for me the day when, during a classroom discussion, one of my kids bluntly told me I "couldn't understand because I was a white lady." I had to agree with him. I sat there and tried to speak openly about how I could never fully understand and went home and cried, because my children knew about white privilege before I did. The closest I could ever come was empathy."

Smith knew that just acknowledging her white privilege wasn't enough.

She wanted to move beyond just empathy and find a way to take some real action that would make a difference for her students.

She kept the same innovative and engaging teaching methods, but she totally revamped her curriculum to include works by people who looked like her students. She also carved out more time to discuss issues that her students were facing, such as xenophobia and racism.

And that effort? Absolutely worth it.

As she said in her acceptance speech:

"We studied the works of Sandra Cisneros, Pam Munoz Ryan, and Gary Soto, with the intertwined Spanish language and Latino culture — so fluent and deep in the memories of my kids that I saw light in their eyes I had never seen before."

The changes Smith made in her classroom make a whole lot of sense. And they're easy enough for teachers everywhere to make:

— They studied the work of historical Latino figures, with some of the original Spanish language included. Many children of color are growing up in bilingual households. In 2007, 55.4 million Americans 5 years of age and older spoke a language other than English at home.

— They analyzed the vision of America that great writers of color sought to create. And her students realized that our country still isn't quite living up to its ideals. Despite progress toward racial equality with the end of laws that enforced slavery or segregation, we still have a long way to go. Black people still fare worse than white people when it comes to things like wealth, unfair arrests, and health.

— They read excerpts from contemporary writers of color, like Ta-Nehisi Coates who writes about race. Her students are reading and learning from a diverse group of writers. No small thing when they live in a society that overwhelmingly gives more attention to white male writers (and where the number of employees of color in the newspaper industry stagnates at a paltry 12%).

— They read about the Syrian crisis, and many students wrote about journeys across the border in their family history for class. The opportunity particularly struck one student; the assignment touched him so much that he cried. He never had a teacher honor the journey his family made. And he was proud of his heritage for the first time ever. "One child cried," Smith shared, "and told me he never had a teacher who honored the journey his family took to the United States. He told me he was not ashamed anymore, but instead proud of the sacrifice his parents made for him."

Opportunities like this will only increase as the number of children from immigrant families is steadily increasing. As of 2013, almost 17.4 million children under 18 have at least one immigrant parent.

Smith now identifies not just as an English teacher, but as a social justice teacher.

ethnicity, responsibility, empathy

Teaching in a racially and ethnically diverse world.

Photo by John Pike. Used with permission.

Smith's successful shift in her teaching is an example for teachers everywhere, especially as our schools become increasingly ethnically and racially diverse. About 80% of American teachers are white. But as of last year, the majority of K-12 students in public schools are now children of color.

As America's demographics change, we need to work on creating work that reflects the experiences that our students relate to. And a more diverse curriculum isn't just important for students of color. It's vital for everyone.

As Smith put it, "We, the teachers, are responsible for instilling empathy and understanding in the hearts of all kids. We are responsible for the future of this country."


This article originally appeared nine years ago.

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