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John Oldman: What if a man from the Upper Paleolithic had survived until the present day?
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Harry: Edith, I was raised on the Torah, my wife on the Qu'Ran, my eldest son is an Atheist, my youngest is a scientologist, my daughter is studying Hinduism, I imagine there is room there for a holy war in my living room, but we practice live and let live.
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Dan: I'm going home and watch Star Trek for a dose of sanity.
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John Oldman: And that's what I taught, but a talking snake made a lady eat an apple, so we're screwed.
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Edith: [talking about God] He's everywhere. We just can't see him.
Harry: Pfft. If this was the best I could do, I'd be hiding, too.
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Edith: Are you sorry for some of those things you said?
John Oldman: I'm sorry I said them.
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[John walks back in the room]
Harry: Well, you're finally fulfilling one prophecy about the millennium, John.
John Oldman: What's that?
Harry: Here you are again.
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John Oldman: Believe in what He tried to teach without the rigmarole. Piety is not what the lessons bring to people, it's the mistakes they bring to the lessons.
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Dr. Will Gruber: I still don't believe you, you know. You need help.
John Oldman: Everybody needs help.
Dr. Will Gruber: Yes, well. Some more than others.
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Dr. Will Gruber: When did you begin to believe you were Jesus?
John Oldman: When did you begin to believe you were a psychiatrist?
Dr. Will Gruber: Since I graduated from Harvard Medical School and finished my residency, I've had that feeling. Why I sometimes dream about it.
John Oldman: Have you acted upon this belief?
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Harry: I can give you the ten commandments in ten words: "Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't."
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Dr. Will Gruber: If I shot you John, you're immortal? Would you survive this?
John Oldman: I never said I was immortal, just old. I might die. And then you could wonder the rest of your incarcerated life what you shot...
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Dr. Will Gruber: We will die, you will live. Will you come to my funeral, John.
Sandy: You've gone too far, John didn't ask to be what he is.
Dr. Will Gruber: And we did not ask to hear about it...
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John Oldman: Piety is not what the lessons bring to people, it's the mistake they bring to the lessons.
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[last lines]
Sandy: You never saw your own child die...
John Oldman: No.
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Edith: My God, what is this? It looks like a genuine Van Gogh, but I've never seen it before...
Dan: Is that an original, John?
John Oldman: No, it's just a gift someone gave me.
Edith: Still, it's a superb copy. Contemporaneous I think, may I take a closer look?
John Oldman: Please, yeah.
Edith: Yes, it's the same stretcher Van Gogh used.
Dan: Hey, there's writing on the back. It's in French.
Edith: To my friend Jacques Bon. Wonder who that was?
John Oldman: Someone he knew, I guess.
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John Oldman: [about the food] Put that stuff in the kitchen!
Harry: [wryly] No, I'm gonna put it in the bathroom, John.
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John Oldman: I had a chance to sail with Columbus, only I'm not the adventurous type. I was pretty sure the earth was round, but at that point I still thought he *might* fall off an edge some place.
The Group: [incredulous looks all around the room]
Art: Look around John, we just did!
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John Oldman: Every 10 years or so, when people start to notice I don't age, I move on.
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John Oldman: I suspect I saw the British Isles from what is now the French coast. Huge mountains on the other side of an enormous deep valley that was shadowed by the setting sun. This was before they were separated from the continent by the rising seas as the glacier was melting.
Harry: That happened?
Dan: Yes, the end of the Plasticine Period. So far what he says fits.
Art: [incredulous] Oh get... from any textbook...
John Oldman: And that's where I found it. How can I have knowledgeable recall if I didn't have knowledge? It's all retrospective. All I can do is integrate my recollections with modern findings.
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Dan: Wouldn't you have some relic, an artifact, to remind you of your earlier life? Like this maybe.
[holding up bone tool]
John Oldman: Thrift shop. Really.
John Oldman: [lecturing now] If you lived a hundred, a thousand years, would you still have this?
[holds up ballpoint pen]
John Oldman: What would cause you to keep it? As a memento to your beginnings, even if you didn't have a concept of beginnings? It would be gone. Lost. No. I don't have artifacts. Keep that.
[tosses the ballpoint pen to Harry]
Dan: Interesting. You could have lied about that.
John Oldman: [totally serious] Don't talk about me while I'm gone.
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Dan: There's absolutely no way in the whole world for John to prove his story. Just like there's no way for us to disprove it. No matter how outrageous we think it is, no matter how highly trained some of us think we are, there's absolutely no way to disprove it! My friend is either a caveman, a liar, or a nut. So while we're thinking about that, why don't we just go with it.
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Art: What you're saying, it offends common sense.
John Oldman: So does Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, that's the way nature works.
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Dan: The objective measure of a clock, is another clock.
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John Oldman: Bathing was the style until the Middle Ages, and the church told us it was sinful to wash away God's dirt. So people were sewn into their underwear in October, and they popped out in April.
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Art: You-you-you realize this is an invitation to men in white suits with happy pills?
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Edith: You think that's all religion is about... selling hope and survival?
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Harry: [insistent] *You* are creating the mystery here obviously y'have something you'd like to say. Say it.
John Oldman: [Hesitant] Maybe... I...
Harry: [sing-song] Ten, nine, eight, seven, si...
Sandy: [Chiding] Harry, stop.
John Oldman: There is something I'm tempted to tell you I think, I've never done this before, I wonder how it will pan out. I wonder if I could ask you a silly question?
Art: [Scoffing] John, we're teachers, we answer silly questions all the time
Linda Murphy: [Teasing] Hey!
John Oldman: What if a man from the upper Paleolithic survived until the present day?
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Dan: Time... you can't see it, you can hear it, you can't weigh it, you can't... measure it in a laboratory. It is a subjective sense of... becoming, what we... are, in stead of what we were a nanosecond ago, becoming what we will be in another nanosecond. The whole piece of time's a landscape existing, we form behind us and we move, we move through it... slice by slice.
Linda Murphy: Clocks measure time.
Dan: No, they measure themselves, the objective referee of a clock is another clock.
Edith: All very interesting, but what has it got to do with John?
Dan: He, he might be man who... lives... outside of time as we know it.
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Dan: A medical test might be a way of proving of what you're saying
John Oldman: I don't wanna prove it.
Art: So, you're telling us this the yarn
[?]
Art: of the century and you don't care if we believe it or not?
John Oldman: I guess I should've expected you to... You're not as crazy as you think I am.
Edith: Amen!
Sandy: I've always liked you.
Edith: Well, thank you dear.
Sandy: Well, that's changing.
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[first lines]
Dan: Hey buddy, you don't waste time, do you?
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Dr. Will Gruber: So, you're a caveman?
John Oldman: Yes, uh... I *was* a cro-magnon, I think.
Dr. Will Gruber: You don't know if you're a caveman or not?
John Oldman: [half laughs] No, I'm sure about that.
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Edith: [Angry] Where were you in 1292 A.D.?
John Oldman: [Calm] Where were you a year ago today?
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Edith: [Upset by one of John's claims] Were you?
John Oldman: [Gentle] If I said no, could you ever be sure?
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Harry: [Wryly echoing Dan] Supernatural.
Art: [Quietly disturbed / reflective] Supernatural, stupid word, everything that happens happens within nature whether we believe it or not.
John Oldman: [Amused] Like a fourteen thousand year old caveman?
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John Oldman: Why not pass the Buddha's teachings on in a modern form.
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Dr. Will Gruber: History hates a vacuum. Improvisation, some of it very sincere, fills the gaps. It would have been easy to falsify a past back then. A few words, credulity time would do the rest.
The Man from Earth Quotes
Extended Reading
