Opening Narration quotes from The Fugitive

For many men, life is a ceaseless flight: each moment of each day must be escaped by fleeing somehow, somewhere, without rest, until one day, all hope dies, even the hope of further flight. Perhaps for such men, death comes as a final and all obliterating act of kindness: after a lifetime of nightmarish flight, an eternity of dreamless rest. But for Richard Kimble, there is no rest. Not free to live, he is also denied the freedom of death.

A carnival can be a place of fun and games or the funhouse mirrors a reflection of man's uglier side. If you happen to be Richard Kimble, it can simply be another lonely street where the laughter belongs to someone else.

A man on the run may manage to elude the law, but his yesterdays follow him like an ever-lengthening shadow. For some, the shadow of the past is an object of fear. But for Richard Kimble, it's a form of security. His memories are a bulwark against hopelessness and despair. When the memories falter, so does Kimble.

The Chinese Sunset Motel, situated on a tarnished hyphen called the Sunset Strip that separates Los Angeles from Beverly Hills. For Richard Kimble, working as a man of all jobs under the alias Jack Fickett, it is a welcome bit of limbo.

The work is hard, to be endured from day to day, but here, just twenty miles north of the Gulf of Mexico, Richard Kimble has found reason to gain a new foothold on life, his first in a very long time.

The life of an artist is a restless, lonely one, without peace -- like a man pursued, finding peace and rest only when he has created something of beauty. But then, after that, he is forced into flight again, and he moves once more into the unknown, searching. For Richard Kimble, a fugitive, there is also only pursuit and a lonely searching. Moments of beauty, even moments of rest, are rare, because for him, as for the artist, to stand still is to die.

Quick reflexes are necessary to a doctor. They are indispensable to a fugitive. For Richard Kimble, who is both doctor and fugitive, they can mean survival.

If you are Richard Kimble, you lead a complicated life. However, certain decisions are simple: when the police start getting involved, you don't wait around to see what happens.

To a fugitive, only the past is real. Each morning, it rises with the sun. Each night, it returns with the darkness. There is no present. And, for Richard Kimble, the future is filled with uncertainty and fear.

A target may be paper, an animal, or a man. To a gun it makes no difference, nor does it care who pulls the trigger or why. To Richard Kimble, a fugitive, guns are a familiar enemy, for he is always a target, a target for which the law has issued a mandate -- if necessary, shoot to kill.

A derrick barge used for underwater salvage work off the coast of California. Richard Kimble has taken the name Tony Carter, and, unknowingly, taken the hand of trouble.

A fugitive has many enemies. A desert is among them. But the desert can also bring friends.

For a fugitive, there must be wariness in even the simplest chore: an extra sense, sharpened by the two-fold chase--the fugitive hunted and the fugitive hunting.

A man on the run comes to expect neither justice nor mercy. Every hand is against him; every face turns away from his pain. In such moments, the thread of hope, of life itself, stretches to the breaking point.

A big city: a jungle of anonymity, where nobody looks too close and everybody is locked in with his own big problem. A hiding place for a man who, for the moment, calls himself Carl Baker.