Taken Quotes

Originally posted 1 January 2003
Re-posted 4 June 2004

Quotes from Taken

These quotes are from the Sci-Fi Channel's mini-series Taken.

"My mother always talked to me a lot about the sky. She liked to watch the clouds in the day and the stars at night...especially the stars. We would play a game sometimes, a game called 'What's Beyond the Sky?' We would imagine darkness or a blinding light or something else that we didn't know how to name. But of course, that was just a game. There's nothing beyond the sky. The sky just is, and it goes on and on, and we play all of our games beneath it."

"Russell Keys came home from the war like a lot of other soldiers. He was tired of fighting, and he was very glad to be coming home. There were things that had happened to him and he knew that he was not the same person he had been when he left. He had changed and he wondered about all the things here at home that might have changed, too, while he'd been away. But sometimes when you go somewhere far away and then come back, the part that bothers you the most is not the things that have changed but the way that other things have stayed the same, like you hand't been anywhere or done anything at all. The kids would still play ball in the vacant lot where he and his friends had played every summer. The high-school band would still play every Friday night in the park downtown, and old Mrs. Parker would still be waiting when the kids came home from school, to yell at them if they stepped on her flowers. All of that might still be the same, but he was different, and so nothing would really be the same at all."

"They say some men carry their war with them for the rest of their lives, and some men put it behind them like an old pair of shoes. And then, I guess, there are other who go on fighting, even if they have no idea who their fight is with or why it's so important not to give up."

"Most people change kind of slowly. They're who they are and then after a while, they're someone else. But some people know the exact moment where their lives changed. They saw the person they were going to marry or the look in their baby's eyes the first time he smiled. For some people, it's not the good things in life that made them change. It's something they've gone through that makes everything they look at from that moment on seem very different from how it had always been."

"People are lonely in this world for lots of different reasons. Some people have something in their disposition. Maybe they were just born too mean, or maybe they were born too tender. But most people are brought to where they are by circumstance, by calamity or a broken heart or something else happening in their lives that wasn't anything they planned on. People are lonely in this world for lots of different reasons. The one thing that I do know is, it doesn't matter what any one of them might tell you--nobody wants to be alone."

"Some people have given up all hope of anything in their lives every changing. They just go on with it day by day, and if something were to come along and make things different they probably wouldn't even notice it right off, except for that kind of nervous feeling you get in your stomach. My mom and I used to call that 'the car trip feeling,' because it was how I'd feel whenever I knew we were going to go somewhere far away or somewhere new."

"Everyone knows not to stare into the sun. It's something your mother tells you when you're a kid. "Don't look at the sun or you'll go blind." But sometimes you want to understand something so badly that you'll risk going blind for just a glimpse of what it all might be about."

"That summer, a lot of things had happened that people couldn't explain. There had been lights in the sky and stories in the paper about saucers crashing. John had come, and then he had gone. For a while, life went back to being life, and almost everyone forgot the things that that summer had brought with it from out of the sky."

"When you're a kid, all you ever want is for the stories your mom reads you to be true. You think you can crawl inside the world that's in every book and live in the pictures on every page, but deep down you know that this isn't something that could ever happen. And it's knowing that the magic isn't quite there, that it's just over the next hill or maybe in the next story, that makes you feel safe in your bed at night. You really wouldn't want it to be any other way."

"My father liked to say that there were these things in life that didn't make any sense, and they could never make any sense, and if you were anywhere near smart, you knew that. But your job was not to give up, to keep on trying to make sense out of them anyway, trying to understand things that could never be understood. I guess maybe people will always find different names for their answers, but the one thing is, their questions will always be the same."

"Christmas is all about hope. Kids hope for new toys. You get older, and the toys get bigger, but the hope stays the same. Some people might hope for peace on Earth or maybe for a better tomorrow, whatever their idea of that might be, but most people still just want something bright and shiny and new."

"Why do people want so desperately not to be alone? Why is it more comforting to think you are being watched than to know that no one at all is watching? And why, really, does that make us any less alone? In the end, if there are others out there, then wouldn't we be, all of us, still alone together?"

"I asked my dad once about his dad, my grandfather. I knew he'd had some hard times, but I didn't know a lot more than that. I said to my dad 'I guess maybe he was kind of lost'. 'Not lost, really," my dad said, 'but for a while, he was definitely bewildered."

"When you're a kid, anything can take you away. Soap bubbles. Or a hose spraying a rainbow up over a new mowed lawn. I guess growing up means that it gets harder and harder to find your way back to that kind of place where you can be taken. The one time I see grownups with that same sort of look on their faces is when they're first falling in love."

"My mom told me once that when you're afraid of something, what you want more than anything else is to make it go away. You want your life back to the way it was before you found out that there was something to be afraid of. You want to build a high wall and live your old life behind it. But nothing ever stays the same. That's not your old life at all. That's your new life with a wall around it. Your choice is not about going back to the way things were. Your choice is about hiding, or about going right to the heart of the thing that scares you."

"Sometimes the best way to move into the unknown is to take familiar steps, small steps. To do ordinary things to deal with something that is in no way ordinary. We're always going someplace new, all the time. Familiar things just let us pretend that we aren't moving into unfamiliar territory. You take those small familiar steps, and you try to be honest, not to live as if nothing had changed but still to go on with your life. But there are times when what you need is a piece of how things used to be."

"When you're little, you like to think you know everything, but the last thing you really want is to know too much. What you really want is for grown-ups to make the world a safe place where dreams can come true and promises are never broken. And when you're little, it doesn't seem like a lot to ask."

"People believe what they want to believe. They find meaning where they can and they cling to it. In the end, it really doesn't matter what's a trick and what's true. What matters is that people believe."

"My grandfather used to tell my mom that kids should never have to worry about anything more serious than baseball. Everything you need to know is there. It has success and failure, moments where you come together and moments where you stand alone. And it has an ending - not a clock, like in other sports, but an ending. And that, my grandfather used to say to my mom, is as close the kid should have to come to that sort of thing."

"People like to examine the things that frighten them, to look at them and give them names. So saints look for God, and scientists look for evidence. They're both just trying to take away the mystery, to take away the fear."

"We all like to think that we have some control over the events in our lives, and a lot of the time we can fool ourselves into thinking that we really are in charge. But then something happens to remind us that the world runs by its own rules and not ours, that we're just along for the ride."

"In the cartoons, someone can run off a cliff and they're fine and they don't fall until they look down. My mom always said that was the secret of life: never look down. But it's more than that. It's not just about not looking. it's about not ever realizing that you're in the middle of the air and you don't know how to fly."

"The world is made up of the big things that happen and the small ones. And the part that's so unfair is that we call them big and small, because when something happens to you, when you lose something or someone that you really care about, that's all there is. The world may be blowing up around you, but you don't care about that. You don't care about that at all."

"I have this idea about why people do the terrible things they do, same reason little kids push each other on the schoolyard. If you're the one doing the pushing, then you're not going to be the one who gets pushed. If you're the monster, then nothing will be waiting in the shadows to jump out at you. It's pretty simple really. People do the terrible things they do because they're scared."

"We're all standing at the edge of a cliff all the time every day, a cliff we're all going over. Our choice isn't about that. Our choice is about whether we want to go kicking and screaming, or whether we might want to open our eyes and our hearts to what happens once we start to fall."

"What makes us human? That we can think? That we can feel sorrow and pain? Maybe. That we can laugh? I hope so. We can hurt or we can laugh, and we know our past and our present, and in some ways, the future. Maybe what makes us human is that we know just enough to think we know where we're going."

"I remember my mom telling me that she only went to church once, with her mother on Easter Sunday. When the minister said that the kingdom of Heaven was within her, that scared her half to death. It meant it was all up to her. People want the comfort of strong arms. They look to the voices in their heads. To drugs. They look to the sky."

"Some people spend their lives hoping for something to happen that will change everything. They look for power or love, or the answers to their biggest questions. I think really what they're looking for is another chance. Some way to lead another life where all the mistakes they've made would be erased, and they could just start over, nothing bad has happened yet, and all their possibilities are still in front of them."

"People move through their lives sometimes without really thinking about where they're going. Days pile up, and they get sadder and lonelier without really knowing why they're so sad, or how they got so lonely. Then something happens. They meet someone who looks a certain way, or has something in their smile,. Maybe that's all that falling in love is: finding someone who makes you feel a little less alone."

"When everything in your life is right on track, it's easy to believe that things happen for a reason. It's easy to have faith. But when things start to go wrong, then it's very hard to hold onto that faith. It's hard not to wonder whose reasons these things happen for."

"People move through their lives sometimes without really thinking about where they're going. Days pile up, and they get sadder and lonelier without really knowing why they're so sad, or how they got so lonely. Then something happens. They meet someone who looks a certain way, or has something in their smile,. Maybe that's all that falling in love is: finding someone who makes you feel a little less alone."

"People come home for a lot of reasons. They come home to remember, they come home because they've got no place else to go. They come home when they're beaten. They come home when they're proud. They come home looking for a door out into their past or a road out into their future. They come home for a lot of reasons, but they always come home to say goodbye."

"Some people put a lot of work into their lawn, as if a patch of green grass was the most important thing in the world, as if they thought that as long as the lawn out front was green and mowed and beautiful, it wouldn't matter at all what was going on inside the house."

"Do you know the feeling of daring yourself to walk across a dark room? That way you're excited because you know, you really do know, that there is nothing there to hurt you. Some people get to choose their dark rooms. They get to look for places where the fear is only skin deep. But some people are nowhere near that lucky."

"What makes a man who he is? Is it the worst things he's ever done? Or the best things he wants to be? When you find yourself in the middle of your life and you're nowhere near where you were going, how do you find a way from the person you've become, to the one you know you could have been?"

"Sometimes people come to a moment where they think they found that one last chance to be someone else and they go for it. When it doesn't work out, they spend the rest of their lives looking back over their shoulder at what might have been."

"I never met my grandfather, but my father told me that he was a very brave man. And with all that he'd done, or maybe because of all he'd done, his favorite thing in all the world was to mow the lawn. My dad said he heard his father talking to a neighbor once. The neighbor asked him how he was and what he'd been doing. And my grandfather said
"I've been cutting the grass and watching it grow."
Cutting the grass and watching it grow. Life, he said, is 90% maintenance."

"Is every moment of our lives built into us before we're born? If it is, does that make us less responsible for the things we do, or is the responsibility built in too? After you hit the ball, do you stand and wait to see if it goes out, or do you start running and let nature take its course?"

"People say that when we grow up, we kick at everything we've been told - we rebel against the world our parents have worked so hard to bring us into, that part of growing up is kicking at the ties that bind. But I don't think that's why we kick at all. I think we kick when we find out that our parents don't know much more about the world than we do... they don't have all the answers. We rebel when we find out that they've been lying to us all along. That there isn't any Santa Claus at all."

"If a dream is just a dream, something that happens in your mind while you're asleep, then that's alright. It's yours to take with you into the morning, and it fades away into the light. But when the dreams start to come when you're awake, and they come with the light, then that is not alright. What we look for then is other people who have dreamed what we've dreamed, who have seen what we've seen. When the dreams become real, sometimes the only comfort you can find is in knowing that you're not alone."

"I think when you're older, what gets hard is that you forget how to take things as they come, and sometimes, the things that do come are more than anyone should have to take."

"When you've done something that you can't take back, something that you don't understand, you start to hold tightly to the things you do understand. And you try to make sense out of everything you can, as if you believed that all you had to do to make things right was to find a reason. But what happens when you find the reasons, and they are not your own? How do you find any comfort or any sense in that?"

"How do you let someone go? How do you understand that that's alright, that everything changes? How do you find a way for that to make you feel good about life, instead of breaking your heart? The hardest thing you'll ever learn is how to say goodbye."

"I don't know what will happen next, I don't know what I'm going to be, what I'm going to learn. But what I do know is this. Life, all life, is about asking questions, not about knowing answers. It is wanting to see what's over the next hill that keeps us all going. We have to keep asking questions, wanting to understand, even when we know we'll never find the answers. We have to keep on asking the questions."