True Detective Pessimism Quotes

It was very fortuitous that the show [True Detective] actually spans seventeen years - so as I was getting older on the show, I was gaining weight. When I'm playing fifty, I'm ten pounds heavier! I don't know if they thought maybe I was method? But it actually worked to my benefit. ~ Michelle Monaghan

The world's most famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, said that once you have eliminated all the possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true. ~ Siobhan Dowd

It was the first time I worked with Matthew McConaughey [in the True Detective].They're fun guys [with Woody Harrelson]. They don't take life at all too seriously, but yet they take their work very seriously. And both of them are just so committed to character and the story. ~ Michelle Monaghan

When I started on 'The West Wing,' that was at a time when this was still a stigma, because movie stars didn't do TV. Now, every movie star is desperate to find their 'True Detective.' ~ Rob Lowe

People incapable of guilt usually do have a good time. ~ Ruste Cohle True Detective

THE WICKED + THE DIVINE is unlike True Detective as: it features women who do things. THE WICKED + THE DIVINE is like True Detective as: we shamelessly rip off huge chunks of stuff from Alan Moore. ~ Kieron Gillen

I think about my daughter now, and what she was spared. Sometimes I feel grateful. The doctor said she didn't feel a thing, went straight into a coma. Then, somewhere in that blackness, she slipped off into another, deeper kind. Isn't that a beautiful way to go out, painlessly as a happy child?
Trouble with dying later is you've already grown up. The damage is done. It's too late. You got kids? I think of the hubris it must take, to yank a soul out of non-existence into this meat; a force of life into this thresher. As to my daughter, she spared me the sin of being a father. ~ Rust Cohle True Detective

A show like 'True Detective' is definitely a drama. ~ John Wells

If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then brother that person is a piece of sh*t; and I'd like to get as many of them out in the open as possible. ~ Rust Cohle True Detective

Transference of fear and self-loathing to an authoritarian vessel. It's catharsis. He absorbs their dread with his narrative. Because of this, he's effective in proportion to the amount of certainty he can project.
Certain linguistic anthropologists think that religion is a language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain. Dulls critical thinking. ~ Rust Cohle, True Detective

I was at the beginning stages of my pregnancy, and it never really feels real anyway, until you actually start showing and you start to feel the baby kick. Fortunately I didn't have any morning sickness or anything like that. And I really didn't want to be distracted from the work at hand, so I didn't tell anybody. It was really just towards the end of shooting where I was about five months, where I needed to tell a costume designer[ of the True Detective]. ~ Michelle Monaghan

There is something deliciously melancholy and haunting about rusting roller coasters, faded fiberglass facades, ferris wheels missing two or three cars, the gradual decay of something meant to be bright and cheerful. -Abandoned Amusement Parks

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. -Edgar Allan Poe

The world thinks eccentricity in great things is genius, but in small things, only crazy. -Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

I'll give you another instance: you know how everybody's into weirdness right now?... A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness. -Tracey Walter "Miller", Repo Man

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead. -Mickey Rourke "Henry", Barfly

There is nothing about me. I exist only in the surface of what I create. I am slowly losing my mind. I am form over function. I am a hollow space with a shiny exterior - I can only reflect what I'm shown. I am mortified to be human and it upsets me greatly that, one ~ Rust Cohle True Detective

If there was one overarching theme to 'True Detective,' I would say it was that, as human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by - so you'd better be careful what stories you tell yourself. ~ Nic Pizzolatto

Nothing in the television show 'True Detective' was plagiarized. ~ Nic Pizzolatto

Well, it is generally considered - though not always true - that the wife of a man so honoured is likely also to be worthy of the honour, and so it is accorded her. In the event it is false, and I have known that to be so in more than one circumstance , it is still accorded her in deference to her husband."
~Sherlock Holmes, with respect to aristocratic titles ~ Stephanie Osborn

People… I have seen the finale of thousands of lives, man. Young, old, each one so sure of their realness. You know that their sensory experience constituted a unique individual with purpose and meaning. So certain that they were more than biological puppet. The truth wills out, and everybody sees. Once the strings are cut, all fall down. ~ Rust Cohle, True Detective

My manager sent me the first two scripts for 'True Detective,' and I just thought they were so interesting and that the world they were depicting was so titillating to me. ~ Cary Fukunaga

You're suggesting the mysterious X. Where do we look for him?'

Poirot said:

'Obviously in a close circle. There were five people, were there not, whocould have been concerned?'

'Five? Let me see. There was the old duffer who messed about with his herb brewing. A dangerous hobby-but an amiable creature. Vague sort of person. Don't see him as X. There was the girl-she might have polished off Caroline, but certainly not Amyas. Then there was the stockbroker-Crale's best friend. That's popular in detective stories, but I don't believe in it in real life. There's no one else-oh yes, the kid sister, but one doesn't seriously consider her. That's four.'

Hercule Poirot said:

'You forget the governess.'

'Yes, that's true. Wretched people, governesses, one never does remember them. I do recall her dimly though. Middle-aged, plain, competent. I suppose a psychologist would say that she had a guilty passion for Crale and therefore killed him. The repressed spinster! It's no good-I just don't believe it. As far as my dim remembrance goes she wasn't the neurotic type.'

'It is a long time ago.'

'Fifteen or sixteen years, I suppose. Yes, quite that. You can't expect my memories of the case to be very acute. ~ Agatha Christie

It's hard because there's a part of me that wants 'True Detective' to win every award we're nominated for. But I'm a huge fan of 'Breaking Bad' and 'Game of Thrones.' ~ Cary Fukunaga

True, my boy. Only Hashem is omniscient, and until He decides we're worthy of His communication via prophets or the Messiah, we mortals are forced to live in a state of ignorance. I've spent my whole life learning, Detective, acquiring knowledge not only from the scriptures of my belief, but from countless other sources - American law, philosophy, psychology, economics, political science: I have studied them all at great length. Yet, a madman can slip under my nose, and I realize I know nothing. I am still a meaningless speck of dust in the scheme of things. A most humbling experience. ~ Faye Kellerman

[True Detective] is an intense show, even in terms of the dialogue - there's a little rhythm to it, in particular in his monologues. I think on those days, he [Woody Harrelson] really had to stay in the zone. Because there's a certain cadence in which that character speaks and talks about life, you know? But then there are other days that he was able to be a little more loose. ~ Michelle Monaghan

'True Detective' is a densely layered work with resonant details and symbology and rich characterization under the guise of one of the forms of this mystery genre. That's what we shoot for. ~ Nic Pizzolatto

Martin Hart: Can I ask you something? You're a Christian, yeah?
Rustin Cohle: No.
Martin Hart: Well, whadaya got the cross for, in your apartment?
Rustin Cohle: It's a form of meditation.
Martin Hart: How's that?
Rustin Cohle: I contemplate the moment in the garden; the idea of allowing your own crucifixion. ~ Nic Pizzolatto

In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So death created time to grow the things it would kill. ~ Rust Cohle True Detective

Television is making, there was in independent film renaissance late '80s through the mid-90's. It was an amazing time. Television is doing that right now. So that's why everybody wants to do it. I mean if you're writing stuff like, you know, Fargo, or True Detective, or any of these things that are on, Breaking Bad, there are no rules in television. ~ Billy Bob Thornton

He thought his detective brain as good as the criminal's, which was true. But he fully realised the disadvantage. "The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic," he said with a sour smile, and lifted his coffee cup to his lips slowly, and put it down very quickly. He had put salt in it. ~ G.K. Chesterton

In the summer of 2010, I was working on a version of 'True Detective' that I was thinking might be my next novel, and it was told in these two first-person voices; Cohle and Hart's voices. ~ Nic Pizzolatto

You gotta get together and tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the goddamn day? What's that say about your reality? ~ Rust Cohle, True Detective

There's a lot of two-hander dialogue in 'True Detective,' and I needed to place those guys in locations where there were other levels of visual storytelling. It didn't necessarily have to move the plot forward, but it had to add tone or add to the overall feeling. ~ Cary Fukunaga

This is a love story. But it is also a detective story. And best of all, it is a true story, told here for the first time. ~ Nancy Carpenter Brown

Karma," he said once, "is not a sentence already printed. It is a series of words the author can arrange as she choses."
Love. Murder. A broken heart. The professor in the drawing room with candlestick. The detective in the bar with the gun. The guitar player backstage with the pick.
Maybe it was true: Life was a series of words we'd been given to arrange as we pleased, only no one seemed to know how. A word game with no right solution, a crossword puzzle where we couldn't quite remember the name of that song. ~ Sara Gran

A selection of quotes from The Night of Harrison Monk's Death (Jane Hetherington's Adventures in Detection: 1)
"Is this one of the more unusual cases of safe-breaking you've been asked to investigate, Mrs Hetherington?"
"Remember your private detective wants to be able to sleep soundly at night and in their own bed, not one supplied as her Majesty's pleasure."
"It seems to be an open and shut case doesn't it? But it's not you know? How do you know if anything is what it seems?"
"But where is Cheung kin?"
"When I first set eyes on your father, he was spying on a man from between two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica."
"I don't think I need say more." "On the contrary, if you want me to have any idea what you're talking about, I think you do."
"Why don't you report it to the police?" "Because I stole it in the first place didn't I?"
"It's something of a mystery, I admit."
"Vanished into thin air!"
"You sound so sensible Mrs Hetherington. Please help us get to the bottom of this."
Ah, thought Jane – the old story.
"No body was found?"
"Shall I put the kettle on?" "Only if you fill it with whiskey."
"The course of true love didn't run smoothly for me either, you know."
"Life has its tragedies for sure."
"… What do I want? I want money that's what I want. I want money."
She was even more horrified by the words she heard next.
Callum MacCallum knew what it was like to be an outsider. ~ Nina Jon

A lot of writers dream of feature films, but television - by way of TNT, CBS, Lifetime, and Hallmark Hall of Fame - has always called my name. And after seeing 'True Detective,' can there be any doubt that the storytelling on TV is as genius as it gets? ~ Luanne Rice

For the finale, I thought the audience deserved to get a close point of view on the monster, and to recognize him the way you recognize the heroes of 'True Detective.' ~ Nic Pizzolatto

Atticus killed several birds with one stone when he read to his children, and would probably have caused a child psychologist considerable dismay: he read to Jem and Jean Louise whatever he happened to be reading, and the children grew up possessed of an obscure erudition. They cut their back teeth on military history, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, True Detective Mysteries, The Code of Alabama, the Bible, and Palgrave's Golden Treasury. ~ Harper Lee

In the official police account, the plumber was shot and robbed on the street. Not true - guys stick together - the detective didn't want the victim's wife to know he was flagrante delicto with a prostitute when wounded. I didn't want her hurt or embarrassed either. She figured it out herself. I met her later, after their divorce, and she brought up the subject. The hospital returned her injured husband's garments. She was washing them when she realized that, although there were a number of bullet holes in his body, there were none in his clothes. ~ Edna Buchanan

'True Detective' would not pass The Bechdel Test. ~ Cary Fukunaga

It often seems to me that's all detective work is, wiping out your false starts and beginning again.
Yes, it is very true, that. And it is just what some people will not do. They conceive a certain theory, and everything has to fit into that theory. If one little fact will not fit it, they throw it aside. But it is always the facts that will not fit in that are significant. ~ Agatha Christie

To realize that all your life - you know, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain - it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream. A dream that you had inside a locked room. A dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams there's a monster at the end of it. ~ Rust Cohle True Detective

With 'True Detective,' you have a lot of time. How I like to describe it ... it's like you're filming a theater piece. ~ Adria Arjona

That was still my meat - the true-detective yarn. I picked it up and started to read it over, wondering for the ten thousandth time why so many people are interested in crime and its solution. ~ Robert Bloch

I think a lot of us responded intensely to 'True Detective' because it was so incredibly earnest. That's what made it heartbreaking and involving. ~ Annalee Newitz

Detective Tripp probably thought I was a complete ass who did nothing but follow his dick around, and while lately that seemed to be at least a little true, I didn't want him to think so. ~ Marshall Thornton

And although she'd glibly remarked that you couldn't stand still, was this actually true or was it a hollow axiom as false and misleading as any other trite saying? Why should one not stand still? If the position in which one found oneself standing was a satisfactory and comfortable one? She felt no need, no need at all to move on from being Mma Ramotswe of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, wife that great mechanic, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

If I write scripts that nobody likes, I don't think we'll be doing 'True Detective.' ~ Nic Pizzolatto