Six Degrees of Separation

Ben:
That's your problem in a nutshell: you're so limited.

Tess:
He offered you parts in Cats? I thought you hated Cats. You said it was an all time low in a lifetime of theatre going. You said, "Aeschylus did not invent the theatre to have it end up a bunch of chorus kids in cat suits prancing around wondering which of them will go to kitty-cat heaven."

Ouisa:
I am a collage of unaccounted for brush strokes. I am all random.

Tess:
I will not be part of this conspiracy!

Flan:
It's not a conspiracy, it's a family!

Ouisa Kittredge:
There is so much you don't know. You are so smart and so stupid.

Paul:
I'll be treated with care if you take me to the police. If they don't know you're special, they kill you.

Ouisa Kittredge:
Oh, I don't think they kill you.

Paul:
Mrs. Louisa Kittredge, I am black.

Ouisa Kittredge:
I will deliver you to them with kindness and affection.

Ouisa:
And we turn him into an anecdote, with no teeth, and a punchline you'll tell for years to come: "Oh, that reminds me of the time the imposter came into our house." "Oh! Tell the one about that boy." And we become these human jukeboxes spitting out these anecdotes to dine out on like we're doing right now. Well I will not turn him into an anecdote, it was an experience. How do we hold onto the experience?

Paul:
It is the worst kind of yellowness to be so scared of yourself that you put blindfolds on rather than deal with yourself. To face ourselves - that's the hard thing. The imagination - that's God's gift, to make the act of self-examination bearable.

Paul:
You watch. It gives me a thrill to be looked at.

Flan Kittredge:
I thought, dreamt, remembered how easy it is for a painter to lose a painting. He paints and paints, works on a canvas for months, and then one day he loses it - loses the structure, loses the sense of it. You lose the painting.

Paul:
The imagination. It's there to sort out your nightmare, to show you the exit from the maze of your nightmare, to transform the nightmare into dreams, that become your bedrock. If we do not listen to that voice, it dies, it shrivels, it vanishes. The imagination is not our escape. On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to.

Ouisa Kitteridge:
I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it extremely comforting that we're so close. I also find it like Chinese water torture, that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection... I am bound, you are bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.

Paul:
Every moment in life is a learning experience. Or what good is it, right?

Paul:
I was wondering if I could f*** you.

Rick:
Man, I don't do things like that.

Paul:
That's what makes it so nice. You don't.

Ouisa Kittredge:
Don't think about elephants.

Flan Kittredge:
Why do you stay in South Africa?

Geoffrey:
One has to stay there. To educate the black workers. And we'll know we've been successful when they kill us.

Ouisa Kittredge:
Oh, goodness.

Flan Kittredge:
Planning the revolution that will destroy you.

Ouisa Kittredge:
Putting your life on the line.

Geoffrey:
We don't think of it like that. I wish you'd come and visit.

Ouisa Kittredge:
Oh, would we visit you and sit in your gorgeous house, planning visits to the townships, demanding to see the poorest of the poor? "Oh, are you sure they're the worst off? I mean, we've come all this way. I mean, we don't want to see people just mildly victimized by apartheid. We demand shock." You know it doesn't seem right, sitting on the East Side, talking about revolution.

Doug:
She said having sex with you was like having sex with a salad with bad dressing! Why did you bring me into this world?

Woody:
That was my first shirt for my new body!

Ouisa Kittredge:
Chaos, control. Chaos, control. You like, you like?

Flan Kittredge:
Having a rich friend is like drowning in your family's lifeboats.

Paul:
I believe the imagination is the passport that we create to help take us into the real world. I believe the imagination is merely another phrase for what is most uniquely us. Jung says, "The greatest sin is to be unconscious."

Trent:
When rich people do something nice for you, you give 'em a pot of jam.

Elizabeth:
"Quality of mercy is not strained"? Well, f*** you, quality of mercy!

Flan Kittredge:
Never bullshit a bullshitter.

Paul:
Did you see Donald Barthelme's obituary? He said that collage was the art form of the 20th century.

Ouisa Kittredge:
Everything is somebody else's.

Paul:
Not your children. Not your life.

Ouisa Kittredge:
No, you got me there. That is mine. That is nobody else's.

Paul:
You don't sound happy.

Ouisa Kittredge:
There is so much you don't know. You are so smart and so stupid.

Paul:
This world has been so heavy with all the right-to-lifers - "protect the lives of the unborn"; constitutional amendments - "when does life begin?"; or the converse, the end of life: the right to die. Why is life at this point in the twentieth century so focused upon the very beginning of life and the very end of life? What about the 80 years we have to live between those two inexorable bookends?