Young Woman: It's tragic how few people possess their souls before they die. Nothing is more rare in any man, says Emerson, than an act of his own. And it's quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. That's an Oscar Wilde quote.
Mother: I love romantic meeting stories. Like in Forget Paris. Billy Crystal?

Father: I didn't like that movie. Billy Crystal is a nancy.
[first lines]

Young Woman: [narrating] I'm thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. IIt sticks, it lingers, it dominates. There's not much I can do about it, trust me. It doesn't go away. It's there whether I like it or not. It's there when I eat, when I go to bed. It's there when I sleep. It's there when I wake up. It's always there. Always.

Young Woman: I haven't been thinking about it for long. The idea's new. But it feels old at the same time. When did it start? What if this thought wasn't conceived by me, but planted in my mind, pre-developed? Is an spoken idea unoriginal?

Young Woman: Maybe I've actually known all along. Maybe this is how it was always going to end. Jake once said, "Sometimes the thought is closer to the truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can't fake a thought."
Young Woman: [about his onset dementia] I'm sorry that y-you're...

Father: That's okay. Truth is, I'm looking forward to when it gets very bad and I don't have to remember that I can't remember!
Young Woman: Coming home is terrible whether the dogs lick your face or not; whether you have a wife or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you. Coming home is terribly lonely, so that you think of the oppressive barometric pressure back where you have just come from with fondness, because everything's worse once you're home. You think of the vermin clinging to the grass stalks, long hours on the road, roadside assistance and ice creams, and the peculiar shapes of certain clouds and silences with longing because you did not want to return. Coming home is just awful. And the home-style silences and clouds contribute to nothing but the general malaise. Clouds, such as they are, are in fact suspect, and made from a different material than those you left behind. You yourself were cut from a different cloudy cloth, returned, remaindered, ill-met by moonlight, unhappy to be back, slack in all the wrong spots, seamy suit of clothes dishrag-ratty, worn. You return home moon-landed, foreign; the Earth's gravitational pull an effort now redoubled, dragging your shoelaces loose and your shoulders etching deeper the stanza of worry on your forehead. You return home deepened, a parched well linked to tomorrow by a frail strand of... Anyway... You sigh into the onslaught of identical days. One might as well, at a time... Well... Anyway... You're back. The sun goes up and down like a tired whore, the weather immobile like a broken limb while you just keep getting older. Nothing moves but the shifting tides of salt in your body. Your vision blears. You carry your weather with you, the big blue whale, a skeletal darkness. You come back with X-ray vision. Your eyes have become a hunger. You come home with your mutant gifts to a house of bone. Everything you see now, all of it: bone.
Young Woman: That's misogynistic claptrap! Freudian bullshit! A person, an adult, has to, at one point or another, take responsibility for who they are.
Mother: I'm saying, take the darn nightgown to the basement. Live dangerously!
Young Woman: Other animals live in the present. Humans cannot, so they invented hope.
Father: Doesn't get any easier as it trudges along, I'll say that.

Mother: What?

Father: Doesn't get any easier.

Mother: What doesn't?

Father: *Life!*

Mother: Oh, no it doesn't. It's basically a fast train to hell.

Jake: For God's sake, mom!

Mother: All right, all right, yes. I'm overstating it. I agree... .it's a fast train to heck!
Janitor: What does your boyfriend look like?

Young Woman: It's hard to describe people. It was so long ago, I barely remember. I mean... We never even talked, is the truth. I'm not even sure I registered him. There's a lot of people. I was there with my girlfriend... We were celebrating our anniversary, stopped in for a drink, and then this guy kept looking at me. It's a nuisance. The occupational hazard of... of being a female. You can't even go for a drink. Always being looked at. He was a creeper! You know? And I remember thinking, I wish my boyfriend was here. Which is... That's sort of sad, that being a woman, the only way a guy leaves you alone is if you're with another guy. Like, if... like... like you've been claimed. Like you're property, even then. Anyway, I can't... I can't remember what he looks like. Why would I? Nothing happened. Maybe it was just... I think it was just... Just one of thousands of such non-interactions in my life. It's like asking me to describe a mosquito that bit me on an evening 40 years ago. Well, you haven't seen anyone fitting that description, have you?
The Voice: It's not bad, once you stop feeling sorry for yourself because you're just a pig, or, even worse, a pig infested with maggots. Someone has to be a pig infested with maggots, right? It might as well be you. It's the luck of the draw. You play the hand you're dealt. You make lemonade. You... you move on. You don't worry about a thing.
Young Woman: Anything an environment makes you feel is about you, not the environment, right?
Young Woman: Everything wants to live, Jake. Viruses are just one more example of everything. Even fake, crappy movie ideas want to live. Like, they grow in your brain, replacing real ideas. That's what makes them dangerous.
Young Woman: It's a uniquely human fantasy that things will get better, born perhaps of the uniquely human understanding that things will not.
Young Woman: It's good to remind yourself the world is larger than the inside of your own head.
Young Woman: People like to think of themselves as points moving through time, but I think it's probably the opposite.
Young Woman: Seems. That's the operative word. Time's another thing that exists only in the brain.
Young Woman: Youth is admirable? How can you admire a person for their age? It's like admiring a certain point in a stream.
Young Woman: Happiness in a family is as nuanced as unhappiness.
Young Woman: I don't think Jake wants me down there.

Mother: Jake can be controlling. You can't allow him to control you. I think it's the other side of his type of personality, this diligence thing, needs to control everything! There are so many, many things that make him nervous and he keeps closing off more and more of the world. It's a problem! And the few people he does have left in his life follow all sorts of rules, it really is a problem. I guess I'm probably to blame. All this guilt causes me to feel obligated to bend over backwards to accommodate his every little whim, it's a vicious cycle!

Young Woman: So what exactly are you saying to me?

Young Woman: I'm saying take the darn nightgown to the basement. Live dangerously.
Young Woman: I don't think Jake wants me down there.

Mother: Jake can be controlling. You can't allow him to control you. I think it's the other side of his type of personality, this diligence thing, needs to control everything! There are so many, many things that make him nervous and he keeps closing off more and more of the world. It's a problem! And the few people he does have left in his life follow all sorts of rules, it really is a problem. I guess I'm probably to blame. All this guilt causes me to feel obligated to bend over backwards to accommodate his every little whim, it's a vicious cycle!

Young Woman: So what exactly are you saying to me?

Mother: I'm saying take the darn nightgown to the basement. Live dangerously.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things Quotes

Extended Reading

I'm Thinking of Ending Things short comments

Aracely 2022-03-28 09:01:07

Don't try to understand it, feel it!
Moriah 2022-01-05 08:01:59

We are still, time passes through us like a cold wind, through the past and future of our parents, through the sea of books and countless jumping names. Remembered and forgotten, young and old, acceptance and rejection of self, the woman who wants to leave and the man who wants to stay. The meaningless muttering was crushed to pieces, and after everything melted, only the wind remained.