text:
Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Clayton Wolfe (October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938) was a major American novelist of the early twentieth century. Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing.

Look Homeward, Angel (1929)

 * A stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces. Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone? O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
 * p. 3

 * Most of the time we think we're sick, it's all in the mind.
 * p. 10

 * It was like a dream of hell, when a man finds his own name staring at him from the Devil's ledger; like a dream of death, when he who comes as mourner finds himself in the coffin, or as witness to a hanging, the condemned upon the scaffold.
 * p. 62

 * The exquisite smell of the south, clean but funky, like a big woman.
 * 69

 * Nacreous pearl light swam faintly about the hem of the lilac darkness; the edges of light and darkness were stitched upon the hills. Morning moved like a pearl-gray tide across the fields and up the hillflanks, flowing rapidly down into the soluble dark.
 * p. 142

 * And it was this that awed him — the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time.
 * p. 157

 * Through Chance, we are each a ghost to all the others, and our only reality; through Chance, the huge hinge of the world, and a grain of dust; the stone that starts an avalanche, the pebble whose concentric circles widen across the seas.
 * p. 160

 * The old church, with its sharp steeple, rotted slowly, decently, prosperously, like a good man's wife.
 * p. 267

 * By Christmas, with fair luck, he might be eligible for service in khaki: by Spring, if God was good, all the proud privileges of trench-lice, mustard gas, spattered brains, punctured lungs, ripped guts, asphyxiation, mud and gangrene, might be his.
 * Eugene Gant contemplating entering the service in World War I
 * p. 434

Of Time and the River (1935)

 * His own power and magic — overwhelmed him for a moment with a feeling of the purest, highest, and most glorious happiness that life can yield — the happiness that is at once the most selfish and the most selfless — the happiness of the artist when he sees that his work has been found good, has for itself a place of honour, glory, and proud esteem in the hearts of men, and has wrought upon their lives the spell of its enchantment. At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being — the reward he seeks — the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.

 * Play us a tune on an unbroken spinet, and let the bells ring, let the bells ring! Play music now: play us a tune on an unbroken spinet. Do not make echoes of forgotten time, do not strike music from old broken keys, do not make ghosts with faded tinklings on the yellowed board; but play us a tune on an unbroken spinet, play lively music when the instrument was new, let us see Mozart playing in the parlor, and let us hear the sound of the ladies' voices. But more than that; waken the turmoil of forgotten streets, let us hear their sounds again unmuted, and unchanged by time, throw the light of Wednesday morning on the Third Crusade, and let us see Athens on an average day.

 * They belonged to that futile, desolate, and forsaken horde who felt that all will be well with their lives, that all the power they lack themselves will be supplied, and all the anguish, fury, and unrest, the confusion and the dark damnation of man's soul can magically be healed if only they eat bran for breakfast.

 * America... It is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.
 * Book 2, chapter 14, p. 155

 * In New York the opportunities for learning, and acquiring a culture that shall not come out of the ruins, but belong to life, are probably greater than anywhere else in the world.

 * Who owns the earth? Did we want the earth that we should wander on it? Did we need the earth that we were never still upon it? Whoever needs the earth shall have the earth: he shall be still upon it, he shall rest within a little place, he shall dwell in one small room for ever.
 * Book 1. This excerpt is also cited in a short story "Forever and the Earth" (1950) by Ray Bradbury.

You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

 * Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time, and now it seemed to George that there was a superb fitness in the fact that the one which held it better than all others should be a railroad station. For here, as nowhere else on earth, men were brought together for a moment at the beginning or end of their innumerable journeys, here one saw their greetings and farewells, here, in a single instant, one got the entire picture of the human destiny. Men came and went, they passed and vanished, and all were moving through the moments of their lives to death, all made small tickings in the sound of time--but the voice of time remained aloof and unperturbed, a drowsy and eternal murmur below the immense and distant roof.
 * Book I, Ch. 5: The Hidden Terror

 * Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox in America--that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, this is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.
 * Book I, Ch. 5: The Hidden Terror

 * To a future world,— inhabited, no doubt, by a less acute and understanding race of men, — all this may seem a trifle strange. If so, that will be because the world of the future will have forgotten what it was like to live in 1929.
 * Book II, Ch. 14: Zero Hour

 * He who lets himself be whored by fashion will be whored by time.
 * Book II, Ch. 21: Love is Not Enough

 * Now they saw it — its newness, its raw crudeness, and its strength — and turned their shuddering eyes away. "Give us back our well-worn husk," they said, "where we were so snug and comfortable." And then they tried word magic. "Conditions are fundamentally sound," they said — by which they meant to reassure themselves that nothing now was really changed, that things were as they always had been, and as they always would be, forever and ever, amen. But they were wrong. They did not know that you can't go home again. America had come to the end of something and to the beginning of something else. But no one knew what that something else would be and out of the change and uncertainly and the wrongness of the leaders grew fear and desperation and before long hunger stalked the streets. Through it all there was still only one certainty, though no one saw it yet. America was still America, and whatever new thing came of it would be American.
 * Book III: An End and a Beginning

 * His enemy was time. Or perhaps it was his friend. One never knows for sure.
 * Book III, Ch. 26: The Wounded Faun

 * Go, seeker, if you will, throughout the land and you will find us burning in the night.
 * Book IV, Ch. 31: The Promise of America

 * So, then, to every man his chance—to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity—to every man the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him — this, seeker, is the promise of America.
 * Book IV, Ch. 31: The Promise of America

 * You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, … back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time -- back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
 * Book VI, Ch. 44: The Way of No Return

 * To believe that new monsters will arise as vicious as the old, to believe that the great Pandora's Box of human frailty, once opened, will never show a diminution of its ugly swarm, is to help, by just that much, to make it so forever.
 * Book VII, Ch. 47: Ecclesiasticus

 * I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me — and I think for all of us — not only our own hope, but America's everlasting, living dream. I think the life which we have fashioned in America, and which has fashioned us — the forms we made, the cells that grew, the honeycomb that was created — was self-destructive in its nature, and must be destroyed. I think these forms are dying, and must die, just as I know that America and the people in it are deathless, undiscovered, and immortal, and must live.
 * Book VII, Ch. 48: Credo

 * I think the true discovery of America is before us. I think the true fulfillment of our spirit, of our people, of our mighty and immortal land, is yet to come. I think the true discovery of our own democracy is still before us. And I think that all these things are certain as the morning, as inevitable as noon. I think I speak for most men living when I say that our America is Here, is Now, and beckons on before us, and that this glorious assurance is not only our living hope, but our dream to be accomplished.
 * Book VII, Ch. 48: Credo

 * I think the enemy is here before us, too. But I think we know the forms and faces of the enemy, and in the knowledge that we know him, and shall meet him, and eventually must conquer him is also our living hope. I think the enemy is here before us with a thousand faces, but I think we know that all his faces wear one mask. I think the enemy is single selfishness and compulsive greed. I think the enemy is blind, but has the brutal power of his blind grab. I do not think the enemy was born yesterday, or that he grew to manhood forty years ago, or that he suffered sickness and collapse in 1929, or that we began without the enemy, and that our vision faltered, that we lost the way, and suddenly were in his camp. I think the enemy is old as Time, and evil as Hell, and that he has been here with us from the beginning. I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land. I think he took our people and enslaved them, that he polluted the fountains of our life, took unto himself the rarest treasures of our own possession, took our bread and left us with a crust, and, not content, for the nature of the enemy is insatiate--tried finally to take from us the crust.
 * Book VII, Ch. 48: Credo

The Anatomy of Loneliness (1941)

 * "The Anatomy of Loneliness", in The American Mercury (October 1941), p. 467

 * The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

 * When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people- not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul, as evidenced by the innumerable strident words of abuse, hatred, contempt, mistrust, and scorn that forever grate upon our ears as the manswarm passes us in the streets -- we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.

 * The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.

 * And the eternal paradox of it is that if a man is to know the triumphant labor of creation, he must for long periods resign himself to loneliness, and suffer loneliness to rob him of the health, the confidence, the belief and joy which are essential to creative work.

 * What Christ is saying always, what he never swerves from saying, what he says a thousand times and in a thousand different ways, but always with a central unity of belief, is this: "I am my Father’s son, and you are my brothers." And the unity that binds us all together, that makes this earth a family, and all men brothers and the sons of God, is love.

 * And Christ himself, who preached the life of love, was yet as lonely as any man that ever lived. Yet I could not say that he was mistaken because he preached the life of love and fellowship, and lived and died in loneliness; nor would I dare assert his way was wrong because a billion men have since professed his way and never followed it.

Quotes about Thomas Wolfe

 * ("Can you go home again?") MA: Thomas Wolfe was right-and he was wrong. You see, you can never leave home. It's under your fingernails, in the bend of your hair. It sings out of your mouth. What I found is that I had to come home to America to write about coming home to Africa. As I write in the book, "Many of us had only begun to realize in Africa that the Stars and Stripes was our flag and our only flag, and that knowledge was almost too painful to bear."
 * 1986 interview in Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989)

title: Thomas Wolfe


text:
User:Rdsmith4

 "There are mom en ts, Jeeves, when one asks oneself 'Do trousers m atter ?'" "The mood will pass, sir." — P. G. Wodehouse

css js

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: User:Rdsmith4


text:
User:Squash~enwikiquote

See Wikipedia in English language user page

title: User:Squash~enwikiquote


text:
User talk:Rdsmith4

→ m:User talk:Rdsmith4

title: User talk:Rdsmith4


text:
Apocalypse Now

Apocalypse Now is a 1979 epic war film that follows Captain Willard on a dangerous mission to assassinate a renegade Green Beret who has set himself up as a god of a band of brutal guerrillas in the jungles of Cambodia. It is a very loose adaptation of the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
 * Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Written by Francis Ford Coppola and John Milius.

The Horror. . . The Horror. . . taglines

Colonel Walter E. Kurtz

 * I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my nightmare: crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor and surviving.

 * Have you ever considered any real freedoms? Freedoms from the opinion of others... even the opinions of yourself?

 * As long as cold beer, hot food, rock 'n' roll, and all the other amenities remain expected norm, our conduct of the war will only gain impotence.

 * I've seen horrors, horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that, but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror! Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.

 * I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile, a pile of little arms. And I remember I...I...I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized, like I was shot — like I was shot with a diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God, the genius of that. The genius! The will to do that: perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand it. These were not monsters. These were men, trained cadres — these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who have children, who are filled with love — but they had the strength — the strength! — to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment. Without judgment! Because it's judgment that defeats us.

 * We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!

 * I worry that my son might not understand what I've tried to be. And if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything — everything I did, everything you saw — because there's nothing that I detest more than the stench of lies. And if you understand me, Willard, you will do this for me.

 * The horror ... the horror. [These are Kurtz's last words, and parallel those of the novella's Mr. Kurtz character.]

Cpt. Benjamin L. Willard

 * [voiceover] Saigon. Shit. I'm still only in Saigon. Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle. When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife until I said "yes" to a divorce. When I was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. I'm here a week now, waiting for a mission, getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger. Each time I looked around, the walls moved in a little tighter.

 * [voiceover] Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another.

 * [voiceover] I was going to the worst place in the world, and I didn't even know it yet. Weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked through the war like a main circuit cable plugged straight into Kurtz. It was no accident that I got to be the caretaker of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz's memory any more than being back in Saigon was an accident. There is no way to tell his story without telling my own. And if his story really is a confession, then so is mine.

 * [voiceover] Charlie didn't get much USO. He was dug in too deep or moving too fast. His idea of great R&R was cold rice and a little rat meat. He had only two ways home: death or victory.

 * [voiceover] It's a way we had over here with living with ourselves. We cut 'em in half with a machine gun and give 'em a Band-Aid. It was a lie, and the more I saw them, the more I hated lies. Those boys were never gonna look at me the same way again, but I felt like I knew one or two things about Kurtz that weren't in the dossier. Do Lung Bridge was the last Army outpost in the Nung River. Beyond it, there was only Kurtz.

 * [voiceover] Oh, man. The bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam you needed wings to stay above it.

 * [reading a letter Kurtz has sent to his son] Dear son, I'm afraid that both you and your mother will have been worried at not hearing from me during the past weeks, but my situation here has become a difficult one. I've been officially accused of murder by the Army. The alleged victims were four Vietnamese double agents. We spent months uncovering them and accumulating evidence. When absolute proof was completed, we acted. We acted like soldiers. The charges are unjustified. They are, in fact, and in the circumstances of this conflict, quite completely insane. In a war, there are many moments for compassion and tender action. There are many moments for ruthless action — what is often called ruthless, what may in many circumstances be only clarity — seeing clearly what there is to be done and doing it directly, quickly, awake, looking at it. I will trust you to tell your mother what you choose about this letter. As for the charges against me, I am unconcerned. I am beyond their timid, lying morality, and so I am beyond caring. You have all my faith. Your loving father."

 * [voiceover] "Never get out of the boat." Absolutely goddamn right! Unless you were goin' all the way. Kurtz got off the boat. He split from the whole fuckin' program.

 * [voiceover] Part of me was afraid of what I would find and what I would do when I got there. I knew the risks, or imagined I knew. But the thing I felt the most, much stronger than fear, was the desire to confront him.

 * [voiceover] They were gonna make me a major for this, and I wasn't even in their fucking army anymore. Everybody wanted me to do it, him most of all. I felt like he was up there, waiting for me to take the pain away. He just wanted to go out like a soldier, standing up, not like some poor, wasted, rag-assed renegade. Even the jungle wanted him dead, and that's who he really took his orders from anyway.

 * [voiceover] If the generals back in Nha Trang could see what I saw, would they still want me to kill him? More than ever probably.

Lt. Col. William "Bill" Kilgore

 * You smell that? Do you smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell — you know that gasoline smell — the whole hill smelled like victory. Someday this war's gonna end.
 * Note: bolded line is ranked #12 in the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 movie quotations in American cinema, and has replaced the full reference in popular culture.
 * Charlie don't surf!

Engineman 3rd Class Jay "Chef" Hicks

 * [after being given a "tour" of Kurtz's camp, which contained rows of human heads impaled on spikes and displayed around ancient temples, Chef is horrified] "This Colonel guy? He's wacko, man! He's far worse than crazy, he's evil! I mean, that's what the man's got set up here. It's fuckin' pagan idolatry! Look around you. Shit! He's loco... I ain't afraid of all them fuckin' skulls and altars and shit. I used to think if I died in an evil place, then my soul wouldn't be able to make it to Heaven. But now? Fuck, I mean, I don't care where it goes, as long as it ain't here! So whaddya wanna do? I'll kill the fuck..."

Photojournalist

 * This is dialectics. It's very simple dialectics: one through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know, without like, you know, with fractions! What are you going to land on, one quarter, three eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something? That's dialectic physics, okay?

 * This is the way the world ends. Look at this shit we're in man. Not with a bang, but with a whimper, and with a whimper, I'm splitting, Jack. [Note: This is a variation on T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men – "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper".]

 * [talking to Willard about Kurtz] Why? Why would a nice guy like you want to kill a genius? Going down pretty good, huh? Why? Do you know that the man really likes you? He likes you. He really likes you. But he's got something in mind for you. Aren't you curious about that? I'm curious. I'm very curious. Are you curious? There's something happening out here, man. You know something, man? I know something you that you don't know. That's right, Jack. The man is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad. Oh, yeah. He's dying, I think. He hates all this. He hates it! But the man's a...he reads poetry out loud, alright? And a voice...he likes you because you're still alive. He's got plans for you. No, I'm not gonna help you. You're gonna help him, man. You're gonna help him. I mean, what are they gonna say, man, when he's gone? 'Cause he dies when it dies, man! When it dies, he dies! What are they gonna say about him? What? Are they gonna say he was a kind man? He was a wise man? He had plans? He had wisdom? Bullshit, man! And am I gonna be the one that's gonna set them straight? Look at me! Wrong! [points to Willard] You!

Others

 * Lt. Gen. R. Corman: Well, you see, Willard, in this war, things get confused out there: power, ideals, the old morality, practical military necessity. But out there with these natives, it must be a temptation to be God, because there's a conflict in every human heart, between the rational and the irrational, between good and evil, and good does not always triumph. Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. Every man has got a breaking point. You and I have one. Walter Kurtz has reached his, and very obviously, he has gone insane.

 * Hubert de Marais: [Redux version] See, Captain, when my grandfather and my uncle's father came here there was nothing. The Vietnamese were nothing. So we worked hard, very hard, and brought rubber from Brazil and then planted here. We took the Vietnamese, work with them, make something: something out of nothing. So when you ask me why we want to stay here, Captain, we want to stay here because it's ours. It belongs to us. It keeps our family together. I mean, we fight for that, while you Americans — you are fighting for the biggest nothing in all of history!

Dialogue

 * Col. G. Lucas: Your mission is to proceed up the Nung River in a Navy patrol boat. Pick up Colonel Kurtz's path at Nu Mung Ba, follow it, and learn what you can along the way. When you find the Colonel, infiltrate his team by whatever means available and terminate the Colonel's command.
 * Cpt. Benjamin L. Willard: Terminate the Colonel?
 * Lt. Gen. R. Corman: He's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct. And he is still in the field commanding troops.
 * Jerry: Terminate with extreme prejudice.
 * Lucas: You understand, Captain, that this mission does not exist, nor will it ever exist.

 * Engineman 3rd Class Jay "Chef" Hicks: How come all you guys sit on your helmets?
 * Soldier: So we don't get our balls blown off.
 * [Chef laughs a little, then sits on his helmet.]

 * Cpt. Benjamin L. Willard: Are you crazy, Goddamn it? Don't you think its a little risky for some R&R?
 * Lt. Col. William "Bill" Kilgore: If I say it's safe to surf this beach, Captain, then it's safe to surf this beach. I mean, I'm not afraid to surf this place. I'll surf this whole fucking place!

 * Cpt. Benjamin L. Willard: Who's the commanding officer here, soldier?
 * Infantryman: Ain't you?
 * …
 * Willard: Soldier, do you know who's in command here?
 * The Roach: Yeah.
 * [He turns away.]

 * Lt. Carlsen: I'm Lt. Carlsen. I was sent from Nha Trang with this message for you three days ago, sir. They expected you here a little sooner. This is mail for the boat's crew. You don't know how happy this makes me in delivering all this.
 * Captain Benjamin L. Willard: Why?
 * Lt. Carlsen: Because now I can get out of here...if I can find a way. [an enemy artillery shell lands dangerously close by as Lt. Carlsen runs away] You're in the asshole of the world, Captain!

 * Cpt. Benjamin L. Willard: My mission is to make it up into Cambodia. There's a Green Beret Colonel up there who's gone insane. I'm supposed to kill him.
 * Engineman 3rd Class Jay "Chef" Hicks: That's fucking typical! Shit, fuckin' Vietnam mission! I'm short, and we gotta go up there so you can kill one of our own guys? That's fuckin' great! That's just fuckin' great, man! Shit. That's fuckin'...crazy! I thought you were going in there to blow up a bridge or some fucking railroad tracks or somethin'.
 * Willard: I'm sorry. Look, I'll cut you loose here and you can turn around and—
 * Chef: No, no, we go together on the boat! We came this far, so we go together. All the way! We'll take you up there. We'll go with you, but on the boat! Okay?

 * Cpt. Benjamin L. Willard: Could we, uh, talk to Colonel Kurtz?
 * Photojournalist: Hey, man, you don't talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet-warrior in the classic sense. I mean, sometimes he'll, uh, well, you'll say hello to him, right? And he'll just walk right by you, and he won't even notice you. And suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you in a corner, and he'll say, "Do you know that 'if' is the middle word in life? 'If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you.'" I mean, I'm no — I can't — I'm a little man. I'm a little man. He's—he's a great man. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas. [Note: The last sentences here reference first Rudyard Kipling's poem If— and then T.S. Eliot's poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.]

 * Col. Walter E. Kurtz: Did they say why, Willard, why they want to terminate my command?
 * Cpt. Benjamin L. Willard: I was sent on a classified mission, sir.
 * Kurtz: It's no longer classified, is it? Did they tell you?
 * Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
 * Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
 * Willard: I don't see any method at all, sir.
 * Kurtz: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? Are you an assassin?
 * Willard: I'm a soldier.
 * Kurtz: You're neither. You're an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.

About

 * My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.
 * Francis Ford Coppala at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival

Cast

 * Marlon Brando - Colonel Walter E. Kurtz
 * Robert Duvall - Lieutenant Colonel William "Bill" Kilgore
 * Martin Sheen - Captain Benjamin L. Willard
 * Frederic Forrest - Engineman Third Class Jay "Chef" Hicks
 * Albert Hall - Quartermaster George "Chief" Phillips
 * Sam Bottoms - Lance B. Johnson
 * Laurence Fishburne - Gunner's Mate 3rd Class Tyrone "Mr. Clean" Miller
 * Dennis Hopper - Photojournalist
 * Harrison Ford - Colonel G. Lucas
 * G.D. Spradlin - Lieutenant General Corman
 * Jerry Ziesmer - Jerry
 * Scott Glenn - Lieutenant Richard M. Colby
 * Aurore Clement - Roxanne Sarrault
 * Cynthia Wood - Playmate of the year

Taglines

 * The Horror. . . The Horror. ..

 * This is the end...

 * To the victims go the spoils.

 * MORNING SMELLS Some People Like Coffee. Some People Like Napalm.

 * It is impossible to describe what is necessary, to those who do not know what horror means. You must make a friend of horror.

 * CHARLIE DON'T SURF!

title: Apocalypse Now