Rust Cohle quotes from True Detective

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 a 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. You got kids? I think of the hubris it must take, to yank a soul out of nonexistence into this meat; and force a life into this thresher. As to my daughter, she spared me the sin of being a father.

Rust Cohle

You know me. I don't see the connection between two dead cats and a murdered woman. [pause] But I'm from Texas.

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.

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.

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.

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. I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, detectives? Well, who knows? When you can't remember your lives, you can't change your lives, and that is the terrible and the secret fate of all life. You're trapped like a nightmare you keep waking up into.

Rust Cohle

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. And that little boy and that little girl, they're gonna be in that room again.. and again.. and again, forever.

Rust Cohle

If you wanna arrest me, go ahead. You wanna follow me? Come on. You wanna see something? Get a warrant. Thanks for the beer. Beyond that, you wasted my fucking day, company men.

Rust Cohle

The newspapers are gonna be tough on you. And prison is very, very hard on people who hurt kids. If you get the opportunity, you should kill yourself.

Rust Cohle

[to Marty] Without me, there is no you.

Rust Cohle

Life's barely long enough to get good at one thing. So be careful what you get good at.

Rust Cohle

[to Maggie] Get on out of here, you're classin' the place up.