Northern Exposure, Season 3

Maggie:
Men can only think of one thing. The joystick. Is it big enough, and where can they put it?

Maggie:
Ok. Sex is fine. Sex is good. Sex is GREAT! Okay, okay, we need men for sex... Do we need so many?

Joel:
Do you believe this; have you ever seen a man with this kind of incredible irresistible magnetism for the opposite sex?

Ed:
James Bond.

Joel:
That's the movies Ed; try reality.

Ed:
No thanks.

Grandma Woody:
All we are, basically, are monkeys with car keys.

Chris:
Hey Joel, you ever have had a pure moment? A moment of direct insight into the divine nature? Happened to me once in prison. Guess I'd been in about a month. One night I chugalugged six hits of potato home brew while watching a strobe candle. I separated, man. I drifted up, circled the pen twice.

Holling:
I'd rather get my brains blown out in the wild than wait in terror at the slaughterhouse.

Chris:
Rain usually makes me feel mellow. Curl up in the corner time, slow down, smell the furniture. Today it just makes me feel wet. What is it about possessing things? Why do we feel the need to own what we love, and why do we become jerks when we do? We've all been there--you want something, to possess it. By possessing something you lose it. You finally win the girl of your dreams, the first thing you do is change her. The little things she does with her hair, the way she wears her clothes or the way she chews her gum. Pretty soon what you like, what you changed, what you don't like, blends together like a watercolor in the rain.

Chris:
For that instant, he looked like his own paddle. There was a song in his heart. It crept to his lips but only the water and the wind could hear. You little traveler, you made the journey, the long journey. You now know things I have yet to know, you little traveler. You were given a name a true name in my father's lodge. Good medicine, little traveler. You are truly a paddle person." Reading from Paddle-to-the-Sea by Holling Clancy Holling

Chris:
I made you, paddle person, because I had a dream. A little wooden man smiled at me. He sat in a canoe on a snowbank on this hill. Now the dream has begun to come true. "The sun spirit will look down at the snow, and the snow will melt, and the water will run downhill to the river, on down to the Great Lakes. Down again, on at last to the sea. You will go on with the water, and you will have adventures that I would like to have. But I cannot go with you because I have to stay with my father and help with the traps." That's Paddle to the Sea, folks. The story of a little Indian Boy who send a toy canoe on a journey that he himself is too young to take. We do the same thing you know? Pioneer, Voyager, Galileo. Our Standard-bearers in the eternal human crusade: exploration. And now we've hit the cosmic trail. Why? Because Earth's played out. You know, less than a hundred years ago Amundsen could've been the first human being to reach the South Pole, Falcon Scott could've died trying. And now…well, last year, China had to close down Mount Everest. Too much litter. The world's become a fragile place. It's not to be conquered, it's to be protected, coddled, nursed, like a little baby. What do we do now? We launch our surrogates into interstellar space, dreaming of that one fine day when we ourselves can go.

Bernard:
As you may know, I spent the last three months in Africa. A wondrous, magical place. But as shadows lengthen across the KBHR window, thoughts turn to homecoming. Journey's end. Because in a sense, it's the coming back, the return which gives meaning to the going forth. We really don't know where we've been until we've come back to where we were. Only, where we were may not be as it was because of who we've become. Which is, after all, why we left.

Chris:
"In dreams begin responsibilities", so wrote the poet. So it is, perhaps. Could it be we take our dreams too lightly, those images from places unknown? Could they in fact be angels in flight; our souls aloft? You know, recent experiences have made yours truly take another pass through the metaphysical thickets. As unlikely as it may sound in this rational age, I emerged on the side of those that cannot help but put their faith in that which cannot be easily explained. Be open to your dreams, people. Embrace that distant shore. Because our mortal journey is over all too soon. "Those cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples. The great globe itself. Yea all which you inherit shall dissolve and like this insubstantial pageant faded. Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with asleep."

Ned:
One person can have a profound effect on another. And two people...well, two people can work miracles. They can change a whole town. They can change the world.

Mary:
I just don't know what men want.

Roselyn:
Mary, if it's of any consolation, you are not alone. Women had been asking that same question since Eve and Adam.

Mary:
Really?

Roselyn:
See, men are confused. They are conflicted. They want a woman who is their intellectual equal, but they are afraid of women like that. They want a woman they can dominate, but then they hate her for being weak. It's an ambivalence that goes back to a man's relationship with his mother: source of his life, center of his universe, object of both his fear and his love.

Mary:
Uh, I've never though of it like that.

Roselyn:
You see, the question is: do you really want a man? For a man to love a woman, this comes naturally because of his love for his mother, but for a woman to love a man , she has to transfer her natural affinity for the female to the male. It's a very difficult process, and in my experience it usually fails. Fortunately, there are alternatives. Just remember one thing. You don't ever need to make yourself into any man's image. People are like shoes, everybody's got a mate somewhere.

Chris:
"The self is in the progress of becoming........." “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”