The Sunset Limited (2011 TV Movie)

Tommy Lee Jones: White

Photos 

Quotes 

• White : And brotherhood, justice, eternal life? Good God man... Show me a religion that prepares one for nothingness, for death. That's a church I might enter. Yours prepares one only for more life, for dreams and illusions and lies. Banish the fear of death from men's hearts and they wouldn't live a day. Who would want this nightmare but for fear of the next. The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy. Every road ends in death, every friendship, every love. Torment, lost, betrayal, pain, suffering, age, indignity, hideous lingering illness... and all of it with a single conclusion. For you and everyone and everything you have ever chosen to care for.

• Black : I ain't a doubter, but I am a questioner.

  White : What's the difference?

  Black : A questioner wants the truth. A doubter wants to be told there ain't no such thing.

• White : The darker picture is always the correct one. When you read the history of the world you are reading a saga of bloodshed and greed and folly the import of which is impossible to ignore. And yet we imagine that the future will somehow be different.

• White : Banish the fear of death from men's hearts and they would not live a day.

• White : I long for Darkness. I pray for death, real death. And if I thought that in death I would meet the people I knew in life, I don't know what I would do. That would be the ultimate horror, the ultimate nightmare. If I thought I was gonna meet my mother again an' start all of that over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to... that would be the final nightmare. Goddamn Kafka on wheels.

• White : Your god must once have stood at a dawn of infinite possibilities, and this is what he's made of it. You tell me that I want God's love? I don't. Perhaps I want forgiveness, but there's no-one to ask it of. And there's no going back, there's no setting things right, there's only the hope of nothingness.

• White : If people could see the world for what is truly is, see their lives for what they truly are without dreams and illusions, I don't believe they could offer the first reason why they should not elect to die as soon as possible. I don't believe in God. Can you understand that?

• White : The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy.

• White : All right. I think the answer to your question is that the dialectic of the homily always presupposes a ground of evil.

• White : The things I love are very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that, I thought they were indestructible. They weren't...

  Black : And that's what sent you off the edge of the platform, it wasn't nothin' personal?

  White : Oh, it's personal, that's what an education does, it makes makes the world personal?

• White : His single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place.

• White : I don't believe in God. Can you understand that? Look around you, man. Can't you see? The clamour and din of those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear.

• Black : The sun don't shine up the same dog's ass every day, you understand what I'm saying?

  White : If what you're saying is that I'm simply having a bad day, that's ridiculous.

  Black : I ain't saying you're having a bad day, Professor, I'm saying you're having a bad life.

• [first lines] 

  Black : So what am I supposed to do with you, Professor?

  White : Why are you supposed to do anything?

• White : What would the difference be, to Him, between a building that was spiritually and morally vacant, and one that was just plain empty?

  Black : Hmm, Professor, you're a theologian here, and I didn't even know it.

  White : You're being facetious.

  Black : I don't know that word - but don't be afraid to talk down to me, you aren't going to hurt my feelings.

• Black : I'm gonna take it the good way, 'cuz that's my nature. That way I get to live in my world, not yours.

  White : And what makes you think mine is so bad?

  Black : I don't think it's so bad, I just no it's brief.

• White : Jesus drank wine, He and His disciples...

  Black : Yeah, He did. Says so right here in the Bible. Of course it don't say nuthin' about Him hiding it in the toilet.

• White : It's the first thing in that book there: the Garden of Eden. Knowledge is destructive to the spirit, destructive to goodness. Everyone knows that story. It's probably the most famous story in there. I suppose from the God point of view all knowledge is vanity. Or maybe it just gives people the unhealthy illusion that they can outwit the devil.

• White : The Bible is full of cautionary tales - all of literature for that matter - telling us to be careful. Careful of what? Taking the wrong turn, the wrong path. How many wrong paths are there? Their number is legion. How many rights paths? Just one. Hence the imbalance that you spoke of.

• White : The darker picture is always the correct one. When you read the history of the world, you are reading a saga of bloodshed and greed and folly, the import of which is impossible to ignore. And yet, we imagine that the future will somehow be different.

• White : Was he killed?

  Black : I hope so, we buried him.

• White : Its that the world is basically a forced labour camp from which the workers, perfectly innocent, are led forth, by lottery, a few each day to be executed.

• White : The things I believed in, no longer exist. Its foolish to pretend they do. Western civilisation finally went up in smoke in the chimneys of Dachau, and I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.

• White : Who knows, maybe birthdays are dangerous, like Christmas, ornaments hanging from the trees, wreaths from the doors, bodies from the steam pipes, all over America.

• White : Suffering and the human destiny are the same thing, each is a description of the other.

• White : Um, cultural things, for instance, books, music, art, things like that. Those are the things that have value to me. They're the foundations of civilisation.