Waking Life

Ethan Hawke

• Whatever I am right now. I mean, yeah, maybe I only exist in your mind. I'm still just as real as anything else.

Kim Krizan

• Creation comes out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration. This is where, I think, language came from. I mean, it come from our desire to transcend our isolation and have some connection with one another. It had to be easy when it was just simple survival. “Water.” We came up with a sound for that. “Sabretooth tiger behind you!” We made a sound for that. But when it gets really interesting, I think is when we use that same system of symbols to communicate all the abstract and intangible things we’re experiencing. What is “frustration”? Or what is “anger” or “love”? When I say “love” the sound comes out of my mouth and hits the other person’s ear travels through the byzantine conduit in their brain through their memories of love or lack of love. They say they understand, but how do I know? Because words are inert. They’re just symbols. They’re dead. You know? And so much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed. It’s unspeakable. And yet, you know, when we communicate with one another and we feel we have connected and think we’re understood I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion. That may be transient, but it’s what we live for.

Louis Mackey

• Which is the most universal human characteristic: fear, or laziness?
• Actually, the gap between say Plato or Nietzsche and the average human is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and the average human.

Jason Hodge

• They say that dreams are only real as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same thing about life?

Guy Forsyth

• The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything.
• The worst mistake that you can make is to think you're alive when really you're asleep in life's waiting room.
• Did you ever have a job that you hated and worked real hard at? A long, hard day of work. Finally you get to go home, get in bed, close your eyes and immediately you wake up and realize... that the whole day at work had been a dream. It's bad enough that you sell your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free.

Speed Levitch

• The ongoing WOW is happening right now.
• And on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion.
• Remembering is so much more of a psychotic activity than not forgetting.

Richard Linklater

• I mean, I'm not saying that you don't know what you're talking about, but I don't know what you're talking about.
• If you can [wake up], you should, cos y'know, one day you won't be able to, so, but it's easy, just, just... wake up!

Other

• Man exiting Convenience store: As the pattern gets more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough.
• Flaming Guy: The Powers that be want us to be passive observers.
• Boat Car Guy: The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving. Saves on introductions and goodbyes.
• Alex Jones with loudspeakers on his car: We have got to realize that we are being conditioned on a mass scale. Start challenging this corporate slave state. The 21st century is going to be a new century. Not the century of slavery; not the century of lies and issues of no significance and classism and statism and all the rest of the modes of control. It's going to be the age of human kind standing up for something pure and something right. What a bunch of garbage! ... liberal, democrat, conservative, republican ... It's all there to control you; two sides of the same coin! Two management teams bidding for control of the CEO job of slavery incorporated. The truth is out there in front of you but they lay out this buffet of lies. I'm sick of it; and I am not going to take a bite out of it! Do you got me?!

Dialogue

Man on the Train: Hey, are you a dreamer?

Wiley: Yeah.

Man on the Train: Haven't seen too many of you around lately. Things have been tough lately for dreamers. They say dreaming is dead, no one does it anymore. It's not dead it's just that it's been forgotten, removed from our language. Nobody teaches it so nobody knows it exists. And the dreamer is banished to obscurity. Well, I'm trying to change all that, and I hope you are too. By dreaming, every day. Dreaming with our hands and dreaming with our minds. Our planet is facing the greatest problems it's ever faced, ever. So whatever you do, don't be bored. This is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting.

Man 3: If the world that we are forced to accept is false and nothing is true, then everything is possible.

Man 4: On the way to discovering what we love, we will find everything we hate, everything that blocks our path to what we desire.

Man 2: The comfort will never be comfortable for those who seek what is not on the market. A systematic questioning of the idea of happiness.

Man 1: We'll cut the vocal chords of every empowered speaker. We'll yank the social symbols through the looking glass. We'll devalue society's currency. To confront the familiar.

Man 4: Society is a fraud so complete and venal that it demands to be destroyed beyond the power of memory to recall its existence.

Man 3: Where there is fire we will carry gasoline

Man 4: Interrupt the continuum of everyday experience and all the normal expectations that go with it.

Man 2: To live as if something actually depended on one's actions

Man 1: To rupture the spell of the ideology of commodified consumer society, so our repressed desires of more authentic nature can come forward.

Man 3: To demonstrate the contrast between what life presently is and what it could be.

Man 1: To immerse ourselves in the oblivion of actions and know we're making it happen.

Man 2: There will be an intensity never before known in everyday life to exchange love and hate, life and death, terror and redemption, repulsions and attractions.

Man 3: An affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified, that it amounts to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation.