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The Man Who Wasn't There

The Man Who Wasn't There quotes

17 total quotes

Ed Crane
Freddy Riedenschneider
Others




View Quote Me, I don't talk much... I just cut the hair.
View Quote Maybe there I can tell her all those things they don't have words for here.
View Quote Sooner or later everyone needs a haircut.
View Quote My wife and I have not performed the sex act in many years.
View Quote Dry cleaning. Was I crazy to be thinking about it?
View Quote Heavens to Betsy, Birdy!
View Quote Time slows down right before an accident, and I had time to think about things. I thought about what an undertaker had told me once - that your hair keeps growing, for a while anyway, after you die, and then it stops. I thought, "What keeps it growing? Is it like a plant in soil? What goes out of the soil? The soul? And when does the hair realize that it's gone?"
View Quote [about his lawyer's courtroom speech] And then it was Riedenschneider's turn. I gotta hand it to him, he tossed a lot of sand in their eyes. He talked about how I'd lost my place in the universe; how I was too ordinary to be the criminal mastermind the D.A. made me out to be; how there was some greater scheme at work that the state had yet to unravel. And he threw in some of the old "truth" stuff he hadn't had a chance to trot out for Doris. He told them to look at me, look at me close. That the closer they looked, the less sense it would all make; that I wasn't the kind of guy to kill a guy; that I was The Barber, for Christsake. I was just like them - an ordinary man. Guilty of living in a world that had no place for me, yeah. Guilty of wanting to be a dry cleaner, sure. But not a murderer. He said I *was* modern man, and if they voted to convict me, well, they'd be practically cinching the noose around their own necks. He told them to look, not at the facts, but at the meaning of the facts. Then he said the facts had no meaning. It was a pretty good speech. It even had me going...
View Quote I litigate. I don't capitulate.
View Quote They got this guy, in Germany. Fritz Something-or-other. Or is it? Maybe it's Werner. Anyway, he's got this theory, you wanna test something, you know, scientifically - how the planets go round the sun, what sunspots are made of, why the water comes out of the tap - well, you gotta look at it. But sometimes you look at it, your looking changes it. Ya can't know the reality of what happened, or what would've happened if you hadn't-a stuck in your own goddamn schnozz. So there is no "what happened"? Not in any sense that we can grasp, with our puny minds. Because our minds... our minds get in the way. Looking at something changes it. They call it the "Uncertainty Principle". Sure, it sounds screwy, but even Einstein says the guy's on to something.
View Quote The more you look, the less you really know.
View Quote You say he was being blackmailed, by who? You don't know. For having an affair, with who? You don't know. Did anyone else know about it? Probably not, you don't know.
View Quote Jacques Carcanogues: [to Ed, after Birdy's audition] I think she'll make a very good typist.
View Quote Birdy Abundas: You know what you are? An enthusiast.
View Quote Ann Nirdlinger Brewster: Knowledge can be a curse.