The Sweet East Movie Quotes
Lillian
I'm just in like, a shitty situation right now and I don't really know what I'm going to do. The clothes I'm wearing are like, the only clothes I have, and I don't know where I'm gonna stay and stuff. I'm down from Baltimore.
Lawrence
Up from Baltimore. It's south of here. Sorry, I'm being a pedant.
Lillian
What?
Lawrence
No, it's okay. I apologize. What were you saying?
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Lillian
Jesus, are you for real?
Mohammad
As real as Jesus.
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Lawrence
[watching a film]
Some dramatic license was taken with the timeline. Poe was in fact steadily employed in the years prior to Virginia's death in 1847, and two years before that he enjoyed enormous popular success with the publication of The Raven, factors which allowed for the purchase of his house at Fordham, which depicted here, if my memory serves, with some degree of fidelity...
Lillian
I'm just glad they figured out how to make movies, like, less boring than this.
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Lawrence
It's a common misconception perpetuated by condescending Europeans that this is a young country, that we're somehow a naive people. Nothing could be further from the truth. Did you know that Philadelphia was the second city of the British Empire, when Manchester and Glasgow were as nothing? Shakespeare's The Tempest was based on the wreck of the Sea Venture, en route to Jamestown, 1609. The oldest representative democracy in the world. But the European intelligentsia, they just love that stereotyped view. They like the situate the American as an insufficiently developed, adolescent proto-European who, given time enough, will evolve into civilized and socialized decadence and decay. Look, we're almost there.
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Ian
You two are a complete pair of cosmopolitan snobs, you know that, yeah?
Matthew
Oh? Is that so? Okay, so, you don't know this, but Ian here spent three weeks living in an air-conditioned trailer in the middle of Shreveport, and now he is an encyclopedia of knowledge of salt-of-the-Earth Americana.
Ian
I'm sorry, is it crazy to say that there are certain observations I might be able to make about your country that are more evident to me as a foreign observer?
Lillian
Oh, yeah, do you do the one about how America is such a young country?
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Lawrence
There's something very fine in you. Something delicate, that cries out for a civilization to cultivate it. You were born too late.
Lillian
Why too late? Why not too early? Maybe I don't exist yet.
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Lawrence
And what in your young life could you have encountered to inspire you? Huh? Reality TV, blockbusters, megachurches? To Kill A Mockingbird? Poison food. Everything you're forcefed from the minute you're out of the cradle by a degraded culture.
Lillian
I don't know. I never really cared about all that stuff. I'm not dumb.
Lawrence
Of course you didn't. Presented only with choices that are beneath you, you opt out. You grow up with nothing to hold onto.
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Lillian
We wouldn't have to get two separate rooms.
Lawrence
But we'd get two separate beds, of course.
Lillian
Of course! Of course.
Lawrence
Because you know I would never...
Lillian
I know. That's one of my favorite things about you.
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Molly
You're beautiful, you know that, right? You're very very beautiful.
Lillian
I know. No I do know that. I just... I don't like being, like, told things about myself.
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Becky
I used to live with this guy who was like a total toxic piece of shit. I mean, I lived off of him, really. Which made me feel pathetic, which made him think I was pathetic, which he lorded over me, and I let him, because my self-esteem was trash, and I had nowhere else to go. And then suddenly one day he just, closed fist, hit me in the face. Boom! And that was it.
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Lillian
[in a letter]
"Tessa, I hope you're all good. I'm all good. I like it here. I'm honestly chilling, and I'm not in any trouble at all. You're the only person I'm writing, but if you feel like you have to tell my parents that I wrote, I get it. If you do, tell them not to look for me. Not that that would keep them from doing what they're gonna do, but whatever. Like I said, I'm fine, and I'm not in any trouble. And this is my choice. Which, now that I'm saying that, I know that's what a kidnapper would say to say. Whatever. If you see my parents, please say hi to Spider for me. Ya bitch, Lillian."
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Matthew
It's all the free love, but also these religious movements like, intersecting inside of it, like, it's exhilarating. All that shit.
Molly
In the community of leave deal that we work with, and the screenplay is actually a composite of all that that was bouncing around at that time.
Matthew
Sort of like what happens when these tight-ass religious fanatics, right, decide to reimagine society, in their own image, but also in their own image? You know, like what happens when you start here and end up there?
Molly
It's crazy. It's crazy is what it is.
Matthew
And then what happens when the almighty dollar comes in, right, when that train starts getting like, fueled by capital, right? Like does it veer off the track, or does it keep on moving? And obviously we know what happened, right? You know, and it's...
Molly
It's the canal boom.
Matthew
Right, right.
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Mohammad
Terrible habit.
Lillian
People keep telling me that.
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Mohammad
You certainly made quite the impression on Ahmed.
Lillian
Is that supposed to be my fault?
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Lawrence
There's something I've always found compelling in Poe's character. Not just this self-destructive, romantic, melancholic stuff, which certainly brought me in as an adolescent, as it still does today, but which, ultimately, I think is irrelevant, and feeds into a rather self-indulgent pernicious archetype which has poisoned the arts. I mean, the popular image of Poe as living alone and in penury is, it should be said, not entirely accurate.
Lawrence
Oh, okay.
[giving her his credit card]
Lawrence
I'll wait here.
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Molly
Any time you get, like, five minutes out of any city, immediately fucking Alabama.
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Lawrence
Do you know that you share your name with a poem about jealousy? The jealousy of the angels.
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Lawrence
I find being out on the open water has a very strange effect mentally. It imbues a real sense of epic destiny. And I'm afflicted with enough vainglory already.
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Molly
But how do you tell it and feel like you're not beholden to this downtrodden and really low idea period that's sort of like based, you know, Masterpiece Theater and Merchant Ivory, you know, the lace, the doilies...
Matthew
Well, I mean, I love Merchant Ivory, so I'm gonna just like - strike that.
Molly
I love - I want to keep ...
Matthew
No, cause she's a Victorian scholar, so I don't want to scare her off.
Molly
I don't think she'd be scared, I think she's really braver than you think. And I love Merchant Ivory.
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Caleb
What I had to ask was, how do you render browsing as a performance? Because that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to take this everyday activity that shapes people's perceptions to a far greater degree than they're even aware of, and defamiliarize it. So take what happened today-whatever it was that happened today. The sound manipulation gives the experience a whole different dimension. There's a layer of distortion on the distortion so you can really feel the process of manipulation...
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