True Detective quotes

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.

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.

See, infidelity is one kind of sin, but my true failure was inattention.

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.