“Unfinished Business” quotes from Criminal Minds

Rust Cohle

What do you think the average IQ of this group is, huh?

Can you see Texas up there on your high horse? What do you know about these people?

Rust Cohle

Just observation and deduction. I see a propensity for obesity. Poverty. A yen 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.

You see that. Your fucking attitude. Not everybody wants to sit alone in an empty room beating off to murder manuals. Some folks enjoy community. A common good.

Rust Cohle

Yeah, well if the common good's gotta make up fairy tales, then it's not good for anybody.

I mean, can you imagine if people didn't believe, what things they'd get up to?

Rust Cohle

Exact same thing they do now. Just out in the open.

Bullshit. It'd be a fucking freak show of murder and debauchery and you know it.

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.

Well, I guess your judgment is infallible, piece-of-shit-wise. You think that notebook is a stone tablet?

Rust Cohle

What's it say about life, hmm? You gotta get together, tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the goddamn day. Nah. What's that say about your reality, Marty?

You figure it's all a scam, huh? All them folks? They just wrong?

Rust Cohle

Oh yeah! Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey, "He said for you to give me your fucking share." People... so goddamn frail they'd rather put a coin in the wishing well than buy dinner.

Rust Cohle

Transference of fear and self-loathing to an authoritarian vessel. It's catharsis. He absorbs their dread with his narrative. Because of this, he's effective in proportion to the amount of certainty he can project. Certain linguistic anthropologists think that religion is a language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain. Dulls critical thinking.

Well, I don't use ten dollar words as much as you, but for a guy who sees no point in existence, you sure fret about it an awful lot. And you still sound panicked.

Rust Cohle

At least I'm not racing to a red light.

Rust Cohle

The ontological fallacy of expecting a light at the end of the tunnel, well, that's what the preacher sells, same as a shrink. See, the preacher, he encourages your capacity for illusion. Then he tells you it's a fucking virtue. Always a buck to be had doing that, and it's such a, a desperate sense of entitlement, isn't it? [looking up] Surely, this is all for me. Me, me, me, I, I, I’m so fuckin’ important, I’m so fuckin’ important, right? Fuck you.

Rust Cohle

People incapable of guilt usually do have a good time.

Do you wonder ever if you're a bad man?

Rust Cohle

No. I don't wonder, Marty. World needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door.

Rust Cohle

This... This is what I'm talking about. This is what I mean when I'm talkin' about time, and death, and futility. All right there are broader ideas at work, mainly what is owed between us as a society for our mutual illusions. Fourteen straight hours of staring at DB's, these are the things ya think of. You ever done that? You look in their eyes, even in a picture, doesn't matter if they're dead or alive, you can still read 'em. You know what you see? They welcomed it... not at first, but... right there in the last instant. It's an unmistakable relief. See, cause they were afraid, and now they saw for the very first time how easy it was to just... let go. Yeah they saw, in that last nanosecond, they saw... what they were. You, yourself, this whole big drama, it was never more than a jerry-rig of presumption and dumb will, and you could just let go. To finally know that you didn't have to hold on so tight. To realize that all your life--you know, all your love, all your hate, all your memories, all your pain--it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams, there's a monster at the end of it.

Every time I think you've hit a ceiling, you, you keep raising the bar. You're like the Michael Jordan of being a son of a bitch.

Fuuuck! Hell of a bedside manner you've got, Rust.

Rust Cohle

Ahh, you know, being stupid is different than going in sick, and this is a bar, not a fuckin' bedside.

Rust Cohle

[to Marty] All the dick swagger you roll, you can't spot crazy pussy?

Rust Cohle

[to Marty] So, enough with the self-improvement-penance-hand-wringing shit. Let's go to work.

Rust Cohle

[to Ginger] I am so done talking to you like a man.

Do you know the good years when you're in them, or do you just wait for them until you get ass cancer?

What always happens between men and women? Reality.