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[from trailer]
Abby: You ever gonna ask me out, Will?
Will: I'm just waiting for the right moment.
Abby: That's good to know. All right. I'll see you around.
[gets up]
Will: [before she walks away] Abby, I'm waiting for the right moment cause when I ask you out, there's not gonna be any turning back for me. I'm not gonna date anybody else for the rest of my life. I'm not gonna love anybody else for the rest of my life. I'm not gonna really care about anything else for the rest of my life. I'm waiting for the right moment, Abby 'cause when I ask you out, it's gonna be the most important moment of my life. And I just wanna make sure that I get it right.
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[from trailer]
Will: Let's get married.
Abby: ...We've been dating less than a year.
Will: I know. And I feel like I've shown incredible restraint waiting this long.
[long pause]
Abby: I love you... but I may not be equipped to be loved this much.
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[from trailer, at dinner table]
Mom: Don't take this the wrong way, all I ever wanted was for Will to marry a woman with dead parents so we don't have to share the grandchildren.
Will: Mom!
Mom: It's okaaay! She knows what I mean...
[everyone laughs]
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Javier: I will accept, but only on one condition: My whistling is for me. My big mouth is for my men.
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Young Dylan: I crave a happy life, grandpa. I have a almost desperate craving for stability and happiness, the way fat people crave chocolate or lost hikers crave rescue. I want to live a big, great, fantastical life, but I am concerned that the tragedy that seems to follow me, the tragedy that birthed me will prevent that from ever happening.
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Abby: Unreliable Narrator!... Unreliable Narrators are considered a device, right? Don't answer. They are. They are and they don't get a lot of literary analysis because it's a gimmick. It's a trick. I mean Canterbury Tales gets a shoutout because, you know, it's good but typically it's used for popcorn crime novels and thriller movies Agatha Christie, Usual Suspects, so on and so forth. But I'm going to argue that every narrator by its very definition is unreliable because when you tell a story there's always an essential distance between the story itself and the telling of said story, right? So therefore every story that has ever been told has an Unreliable Narrator. The only truly reliable narrator would be someone hypothetically telling a story that unfolds before our very eyes which is obviously very impossible SO what does that tell us? That the only truly reliable narrator is life itself. But life itself is also completely unreliable because it is constantly misdirecting and misleading us and taking us on this journey where it is literally impossible to predict where it is going to go next... Life as the ultimate Unreliable Narrator.
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Elena Dempsey-González: When critics reviewed Abby Dempsey's favorite album, Bob Dylan's 1997 release, "Time Out of Mind," the song "Make You Feel My Love" was a source of much criticism. Every track on the album brimmed with unrelenting melancholy and sadness. But there, smack in the middle of it all, sat an unbashedly populist hit song, a love song... a song that in years to come would be covered by Garth Brooks, of all people. Critics argued that putting an on-the-nose love song in the middle of an album about despair and tragedy was Dylan's only misstep. Others argued that was his point.
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Dr. Cait Morris: How are you feeling?
Will: [shrugs] Meh! You know... same.
Dr. Cait Morris: You keep saying that.
Will: I keep meaning it.
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Narrator: Rodrigo entered college a visiting freshman, and as he'd been doing for most of the previous decade, he thrived.
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Rodrigo (7-10 Years Old): [looking out from the stopped bus] Are you okay?
Dylan: [sitting at the bus stop] Does it matter?
Elena Dempsey-González: [narrating] If Rodrigo González had really been there that night, he might have told the lonely young woman sitting in front of him that it mattered quite a bit to him that Dylan Dempsey was okay.
Life Itself Quotes
Extended Reading
