Mosquito Coast

Allie Fox:
Everything we need is here. Right here. We can live simply: gardening, beach combing. I'm a changed man, mother. No more chemicals or poisons. If what you want isn't washed up on this beach, you probably don't need it.

Charlie:
Once I had believed in father and the world had seemed small and old. Now he was gone and I wasn't afraid to love him anymore. And the world seemed limitless.

Allie Fox:
It's an absolute sin to accept the decadence of obsolescence. Why do things get worse and worse? They don't have to. They could get better and better. We accept that things fall apart.

Allie Fox:
We eat when we're not hungry, drink when we're not thirsty. We buy what we don't need and throw away everything that's useful. Why sell a man what he wants? Sell him what he doesn't need. Pretend he's got eight legs and two stomachs and money to burn. It's wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Allie:
Strictly speaking, there's no such thing as invention, you know. It's only magnifying what already exists.

Charlie:
My father often talked of things being revealed - that was true invention, he said. Revealing something's use, and magnifying it; discovering its imperfections, improving it, and putting it to work for you. God had left the world incomplete, he said, and it was man's job to understand how it worked, to tinker with it, and to finish it. I think that was why he hated missionaries so much - because they taught people to put up with their earthly burdens. For father, there were no burdens that couldn't be fitted with a set of wheels, or rudders, or a system of pulleys.