When Harry Met Sally quotes

View Quote Sally: Thank God he couldn't place me, I drove from college to New York with him five years ago and it was the longest night of my life.
Joe: What happened?
Sally: He made a pass at me and when I said no - he was going with a girlfriend of mine uh... Oh God I can't even remember her name! Don't get involved with me Joe I am twenty six years old and I can't even remember the name of the girl I was such good friends with I wouldn't get involved with her boyfriend.
Joe: So what happened?
Sally: When?
Joe: When... when he made a pass at you and you said no and...
Sally: Oh, oh. I said we could just be friends. And this part I can remember he said that men and women could never really be friends. Do you think that's true?
Joe: No.
Sally: Do you have any women friends, just friends?
Joe: No. But I will get one if it is important to you.

View Quote Harry: You were a good friend of umm...
Sally: Amanda's. I can't believe you can't remember her name.
Harry: What do you mean? I remember, Amanda right? Amanda Rice.
Sally: Reese.
Harry: Reese, right! That's what I said! What ever happened to her?
Sally: I have no idea.
Harry: You have no idea? You were really good friends with her. We didn't make it because you were such good friends.
Sally: You went with her!
Harry: And was it worth it? The sacrifice for a friend that you don't even keep in touch with?
Sally: Harry, you might not believe this but I never considered not sleeping with you a sacrifice.
Harry: Fair enough. Fair enough.

View Quote Harry: You were going to be a gymnast.
Sally: A journalist.
Harry: Right, that's what I said. And?
Sally: I am a journalist, I work at The News.
Harry: Great! And you're with Joe. Well that's great, great. You're together, what, three weeks?
Sally: A month, how did you know that?
Harry: You take someone to the airport it's clearly the beginning of a relationship. That's why I have never taken anyone to the airport at the beginning of a relationship.
Sally: Why?
Harry: Because eventually if things move on and you don't take someone to the airport, and I never wanted anyone to say to me, "How come you never take me to the airport anymore?"
Sally: It's amazing, you look like a normal person but actually you are the Angel of Death.

View Quote Harry: You know you just get to a certain point where you get tired of the whole thing.
Sally: What "whole thing"?
Harry: The whole life-of-a-single-guy thing. You meet someone, you have the safe lunch, you decide you like each other enough to move on to dinner. You go dancing, you do the white-man's over-bite, go back to her place, you have sex and the minute you're finished you know what goes through your mind? How long do I have to lie here and hold her before I can get up and go home. Is thirty seconds enough?
Sally: That's what you're thinking? Is that true?
Harry: Sure! All men think that. How long do you want to be held afterwards? All night, right? See there's your problem, somewhere between thirty seconds and all night is your problem.
Sally: I don't have a problem!
Harry: Yeah you do.

View Quote Harry: Would you like to have dinner?... Just friends.
Sally: I thought you didn't believe men and women could be friends.
Harry: When did I say that?
Sally: On the ride to New York.
Harry: No, no, no, no, I never said that... Yes, that's right, they can't be friends. Unless both of them are involved with other people, then they can... This is an amendment to the earlier rule. If the two people are in relationships, the pressure of possible involvement is lifted... That doesn't work either, because what happens then is, the person you're involved with can't understand why you need to be friends with the person you're just friends with. Like it means something is missing from the relationship and why do you have to go outside to get it? And when you say "No, no, no, no, it's not true, nothing is missing from the relationship," the person you're involved with then accuses you of being secretly attracted to the person you're just friends with, which you probably are. I mean, come on, who the hell are we kidding, let's face it. Which brings us back to the earlier rule before the amendment, which is men and women can't be friends.

View Quote Man: We were married forty years ago. We were married three years, we got a divorce. Then I married Margerie.
Woman: But first you lived with Barbara.
Man: Right, Barbara. But I didn't marry Barbara I married Margerie.
Woman: Then he got a divorce.
Man: Right, then I married Kitty.
Woman: Another divorce.
Man: Then a couple of years later at Atticalicio's funeral, I ran into her. I was with some girl I don't even remember.
Woman: Roberta.
Man: Right, Roberta. But I couldn't take my eyes off you. I remember I snuck over to her and I said... What did I say?
Woman: You said, "What are you doing after?"
Man: Right. So I ditched Roberta, we go for a coffee, a month later we were married.
Woman: Thirty five years today after our first marriage.

View Quote Sally: Joe and I broke up.
Alice: What?
Marie: When?
Sally: Monday.
Alice: You waited three days to tell us?
Marie: You mean Joe's available?
Alice: Oh for God's sakes Marie don't you have any feelings about this? She's obviously upset.
Sally: I'm not that upset, we've been growing apart for quite a while.
Marie: But you guys were a couple, you had someone to go places with, you had a date on national holidays.
Sally: I said to myself, "You deserve more than this, you're thirty one years old..."
Marie: And the clock is ticking.
Sally: No, the clock doesn't really start to tick until you're thirty six.
Alice: God you're in such great shape.
Sally: Well, I've had a few days to get use to it, and uh...I feel OK.
Marie: Good. Then you're ready. [takes out a rolodex]

View Quote Sally: Look, there is no point in my going out with someone I might really like if I met him at the right time, but who right now has no chance of being anything to me but a transitional man.
Marie: OK, but don't wait too long. Remember what happened to David Walsaw? His wife left him and everyone said, "Give him some time, don't move in too fast." Six months later he was dead.
Sally: What are you saying? I should get married to someone right away in case he's about to die?
Alice: At least you could say you were married.
Marie: I'm saying, that the right man for you might be out there right now, and if you don't grab him someone else will and you'll have spend the rest of your life knowing that someone else is married to your husband.

View Quote Sally: When Joe and I started seeing each other, we wanted exactly the same thing. We wanted to live together, but we didn't want to get married because every time anyone we knew got married, it ruined their relationship. They practically never had sex again. It's true, it's one of the secrets that no one ever tells you. I would sit around with my girlfriends who have kids — and, actually, my one girlfriend who has kids, Alice — and she would complain about how she and Gary never did it anymore. She didn't even complain about it, now that I think about it. She just said it matter-of-factly. She said they were up all night, they were both exhausted all the time, the kids just took every sexual impulse they had out of them. And Joe and I used to talk about it, and we'd say we were so lucky we have this wonderful relationship, we can have sex on the kitchen floor and not worry about the kids walking in. We can fly off to Rome on a moment's notice. And then one day I was taking Alice's little girl for the afternoon because I'd promised to take her to the circus, and we were in the cab playing "I Spy" — I spy a mailbox, I spy a lamp-post — and she looked out the window and she saw this man and this woman with these two little kids. And the man had one of the little kids on his shoulders, and she said, "I spy a family." And I started to cry. You know, I just started crying. And I went home, and I said, "The thing is, Joe, we never do fly off to Rome on a moment's notice."
Harry: And the kitchen floor?
Sally: [sadly] Not once. It's this very cold, hard Mexican ceramic tile.

View Quote Sally: At least I got the apartment.
Harry: That's what everybody says to me too. But really what's so hard about finding an apartment? What you do is, you read the obituary column. Yeah, you find out who died, and go to the building and then you tip the doorman. What they can do to make it easier is to combine the obituaries with the real estate section. Say, then you'd have Mr. Klein died today leaving a wife, two children, and a spacious three bedroom apartment with a wood burning fireplace.

View Quote Harry: You know the first time I met I really didn't like you that much.
Sally: I didn't like you.
Harry: Yeah you did, you were just so uptight then. You're much softer now.
Sally: You know I hate that kind of remark. It sounds like a complement but really it's an insult.
Harry: OK, you're still as hard as nails.
Sally: I just didn't want to sleep with you and you had to write it off as a character flaw instead of dealing with the possibility that it might have something to do with you.
Harry: What's the statute of limitation on apologies?
Sally: Ten years.
Harry: Ooo, I can just get it in under the wire.
Sally: Would you like to have dinner with me some time?
Harry: Are we becoming friends now?
Sally: Well... [Pause] yeah.
Harry: Great! A woman friend... You know you may be the first attractive woman I have not wanted to sleep with in my entire life.
Sally: That's wonderful Harry.

View Quote Man: We were both born in the same hospital.
Woman: Nineteen twenty one.
Man: Seven days apart.
Woman: In the same hospital.
Man: We both grew up one block away from each other.
Woman: We both lived in tenements.
Man: On the lower east side.
Woman: On Delancey Street.
Man: My family moved to the Bronx when I was ten.
Woman: He lived on Fordham Road.
Man: Hers moved when she was eleven.
Woman: I lived on a hundred and eighty third Street.
Man: For six years she worked on the fifteenth floor as a nurse where I had a practice on the fourteenth floor in the very same building.
Woman: I worked for a very prominent neurologist. We never met.
Man: Never met.
Woman: Can you imagine that?
Man: You know where we met? In an elevator. In the Ambassador Hotel, in Chicago, Illinois.
Woman: I was visiting family. He was on the third floor I was on the twelve.
Man: I rode up nine extra floors just to keep talking to her.
Woman: Nine extra floors.

View Quote Harry: There are two kinds of women: high maintenance and low maintenance.
Sally: And Ingrid Bergman is low maintenance?
Harry: An L.M. Definitely.
Sally: Which one am I?
Harry: You're the worst kind. You're high maintenance but you think you're low maintenance.
Sally: I don't see that.
Harry: You don't see that? "Waiter, I'll begin with the house salad, but I don't want the regular dressing. I'll have the balsamic vinegar and oil, but on the side, and then the salmon with the mustard sauce, but I want the mustard sauce on the side." 'On the side' is a very big thing for you.
Sally: Well, I just want it the way I want it.
Harry: I know, high maintenance.

View Quote Harry: I had my dream again, where I'm making love and the Olympic judges are watching. I've nailed the compulsories so this is it, the finals. I got a nine eight from the Canadian, a perfect ten from the American, and my mother disguised as a East German judge gave me a five six. Must've been the dismount.
Sally: Well, basically it's the same one I've been having since I was twelve.
Harry: What happens?
Sally: It's too embarrassing.
Harry: Don't tell me.
Sally: Okay, there's this guy...
Harry: What does he look like?
Sally: I don't know, he's just kind of faceless.
Harry: Faceless guy, okay. Then what?
Sally: He rips off my clothes.
Harry: Then what happens?
Sally: That's it.
Harry: That's it? The faceless guy rips off all your clothes, and that's the sex fantasy you've been having since you were twelve? Exactly the same.
Sally: Well sometimes I vary it a little.
Harry: Which part?
Sally: What I'm wearing.

View Quote Harry: It was the most uncomfortable night of my life.
Sally: Oh...The first day back is always the toughest Harry.
Harry: We only had one date. How do you know it's not going to get worse?
Sally: How much worse can it get than finishing dinner having him reaching over pull a hair out of my head and starts flossing with it at the table?
Harry: We're talking dream dates compared to my horror. It started out fine, she's a very nice person, and we're sitting and we're talking at this Ethiopian restaurant that she wanted to go to. And I was making jokes, you know like, "Hey I didn't know that they had food in Ethiopia? This will be a quick meal. I'll order two empty plates and we can leave."
[Sally laughs]
Harry: Yeah, nothing from her not even a smile. So I down shift into small talk, and I asked her where she went to school and she said. "Michigan State", and this reminds me of Helen. All of a sudden I'm in the middle of this mess of an anxiety attack, my heart is beating like a wild man and I start sweating like a pig.
Sally: Helen went to Michigan State?
Harry: No she went to Northwestern, but they're both Big-Ten schools. I got so upset I had to leave the restaurant.
Sally: Harry I think this takes a long time. It might be months before we're actually able to enjoy going out with someone new.
Harry: Yah...
Sally: And maybe longer, before we're actually able to go to bed with someone new.
Harry: Oh I went to bed with her.
Sally: You went to bed with her?
Harry: Sure.
Sally: Oh.