Inherent Vice Quotes
"Some nights, when the wind was right, you could hear the surf all over town."
"If he had a nickel for every time he’d heard a client start off this way, he could be over in Hawaii now, loaded day and night."
"Anybody with any claim to hipness 'loved' everybody."
"A Renaissance detective...which means that I am many things—but one thing I am not is stupid."
"You’d be surprised how many in your own hippie freak community have found our Special Employee disbursements useful."
"Don’t tell me you can’t use it. I am aware of the Freak Brothers’ dictum that dope will get you through times of no money better than vice versa."
"I always knew you had potential. So! how about it?"
"All those downtown evidence rooms got filled up ages ago, now about once every month Property Section has to rent more warehouse space out in deep unincorporated county, bricks and bricks of shit stacked to the roof and spilling out in the parking lot, Acapulco Gold! Panama Red! Michoacán Icepack! numberless kilos of righteous weed, name your figure, just for trivial information we already have anyway."
"Good thing you’re not recruiting for the NCAA, Bigfoot, you’d be in some deep shit."
"Nobody said you did, fact they thought for a while it was me."
"This is not some bunch of fools like the LAPD, this is some heavy-ass motherfuckers."
"There was an ancient superstition at the beach, something like the surfer belief that burning your board will bring awesome waves, and it went like this—take a Zig-Zag paper and write on it your dearest wish, and then use it to roll a joint of the best dope you can find, and smoke it all up, and your wish would be granted."
"My tits aren’t really that big, but it’s the thought that counts."
"Everybody else will move on, but guess who, for his sins, will remain stuck out here forever in Gordita, nothin but penny-ante collars, kids under the pier dealing their moms’ downers, when I should be in West L.A. or Hollywood Division, at least."
"But his work also had such a spiritual quality—you look at Ida Lupino in her closeups—those eyes!—and instead of hard-edged lamp reflections there’s this glow, this purity, almost as if it’s coming from inside."
"Never trust a flatland chick, man, prime directive of life at the beach."
"Maybe you did do it, has that crossed your mind yet? Maybe you just conveniently forgot about it."
"Life in psychedelic-sixties L.A. offered more cautionary arguments than you could wave a joint at against too much trust."
"What kind of DDA game was she running on him now?"
"All these mirrors in here, as Doc checked out his image, were somehow presenting as just another red-eyed doper’s stare."
"It’s a big schooner, I think somebody said. Brings stuff in and out of the country, but nobody wants to talk about what exactly."
"The air was dense with smoke from opium pipes and cannabis bongs, as well as clove cigarettes, Malaysian cheroots, and correctional-system Kools."
"In motion by the ocean, Doin what the motorheads do."
"Doc sang her a few quiet falsetto bars of 'Wouldn’t It Be Nice.'"
"Grille to grille, by the time we hit Leo Carrillo, And it still, wasn’t over by Point Mugu."
"Remember, as a COINTELPRO informant you could be making up to three hundred dollars a month."
"Well really, think about it, all through history, islands in the Pacific Ocean have been rising and sinking."
"Not so strange really, there’s always been predictions that someday Lemuria would reemerge."
"The universe? it’s been, like, expanding? So when you get there, everything else will be the same weight, but bigger."
"Their country, they want it, fine with me. Long as I can just work on my bike without nobody hassling me."
"The good news is that like any living creature, Earth has an immune system too, and sooner or later she’s going to start rejecting agents of disease."
"I knew I smelled something in here. Lucky for you I don’t go in to work tomorrow."
"It’s all supposed to be so innocent, upwardly mobile snob, so desperate to show he’s got good taste."
"There are always the whiners and complainers who’ll say, this is fascism. Well, fellow Americans, if it’s Fascism for Freedom? I can dig it!"
"But now that he’s been all over the TV? he has instant and wide credibility."
"Every once in a while, they’d wave you over and go, look, you gonna sleep on the base tonight? you’d say, yeah, why? and they’d say, don’t sleep on the base tonight. Saved my ass a couple times like that."
"Maybe she was learning to sail island to island on an outrigger canoe, to read the currents and the winds, and how to sense magnetic fields like a bird."
"‘Fifty,’ huh. I’m talkin about Charlie Manson gettin popped."
"Nothing was supposed to happen this way, Doc, I’m so sorry."
"Keep clear of the Fang. If they even begin to think you might get between them and their money, best you go looking for something else to do. Far away, if possible."
"I wanted to get clean, and I thought I wanted to do something for my country. Stupid as it sounds."
"I’m lower than a groupie, fetching weed, opening beers, making sure there’s only aqua jelly beans in the big punch bowl in the parlor."
"It’s one more of these places a voice from somewhere else tells you you have to be."
"Like, you make these choices? you know for sure you’re doing the right thing for everybody, then it all goes belly-up and you see it couldn’t have been more wrong."
"My country right or wrong, with Vietnam goin on? that’s just fuckin crazy."
"Nothing about it there they were, presently making out frantically, like kids at the drive-in, steaming up the windows and getting the seat covers wet."
"People began to go crazy even while on the natch."
"Maybe it’s all this rain, but we’re starting to have the same dreams."
"This had to be a message from someplace besides a Pacific island whose name he couldn’t pronounce."
"Denis, I’m gonna look around for a while, you want to wait in the car or come in and cover my back or something?"
"I was gonna go try and find a pizza," Denis said.
"No worries, it’s on the house, as the TV antenna man always sez."
"His childlike nature will usually respond positively to drugs, sex, and/or rock and roll."
"If you save somebody’s life, you are responsible for them from then on, forever."
"All across a city long devoted to illusory product, clairvoyant Japonica had seen them."
"He saw these girls on the streets of Hollywood, on the TV screen, but this was his first up-close encounter."
"We’re in the miracle business! If Jesus turned water into wine in front of your face? would you be goin, ‘What’s this I’m drinkín, I wannit Dom Pérignon,’ or some shit?"
"Every gathering of three or more civilians is now defined as a potential cult."
"And unless there’s wants or warrants we don’t know about, you won’t hear any more on this."
"He’s been out there sold-ierin for a Fascist state, so don’t ex- Pect too much fun on the Very first date."
"Everybody's time is precious, in its own way."
"It's like the beach, where you lived in a climate of unquestioning hippie belief, pretending to trust everybody while always expecting to be sold out."
"Nobody here's going to rat him out, especially not to a stranger, nothing personal."
"Everybody knows that Puck used to work for Mickey. Nobody here's going to rat him out, especially not to a stranger, nothing personal."
"You probably imagine I have a lot of status up in Robbery-Homicide."
"Doc hadn’t got around yet to considering what, according to Art Tweedle, was now a far more sinister Bigfoot Bjornsen than he’d imagined."
"And there ain’t a woman breathing between here and Lake Mead don’t know that by now."
"In the middle of the desert, produces no tangible goods, money flows in, money flows out, nothing is produced. This place should not, according to theory, even exist, let alone prosper as it does."
"I feel my whole life has been based on illusory premises. I have lost reality."
"Forget the creeps and crises, Crank up ’at neon light— Full moon in Pisces, Hell, it’s Saturday night."
"A need, so hopeless, so shameless, that nothing nobody can say means shit."
"You don’t want to be fucking with this, Doc."
"Love is the only thing that will ever save us."
"I'm just the karmic facilitator, I really have the gift for knowing who's supposed to be together and who's not, and I'm never wrong."
"The world we see Dorothy living in at the beginning of the picture is black, actually brown, and white, only she thinks she's seeing it all in color."
"You think whatever it is, you're entitled because you're cute or something."
"Remember too that Glen’s weapons deal never went through. So you don’t really have to tell anybody anything."
"Maybe if he searched through it long enough, late enough into the night, he’d find something that might help—some tiny forgotten scrap of his life he didn’t even know was missing, something that would make all the difference now."
"You can't always blame zombies for their condition, ain't like there's guidance counselors going around, 'Hey, kid, you ever consider career opportunities with the undead—'"
"Mine told me I should go into real estate, like my mom."
"Anybody understand why they call it 'real' estate?"
"Just so's you examine her regularly for bites, which is how it gets transmitted."
"Well, maybe the label they're signed with, but . . ."
"Yeah, but you should see some of her co-brokers. . . ."
"Hey, I saw them, just the other day, lurking in the alley."
"It’s what you can’t avoid, stuff marine policies don’t like to cover. Usually applies to cargo—like eggs break—but sometimes it’s also the vessel carrying it. Like why bilges have to be pumped out?"
"Built into the act of return finally was this glittering mosaic of doubt. Something like what Sauncho’s colleagues in marine insurance liked to call inherent vice."
"It’s about being in place. We’ve been in place forever. Look around. Real estate, water rights, oil, cheap labor—all of that’s ours, it’s always been ours."
"People with a decent respect for preserving the environment against high-density tenement scum without the first idea of how to clean up after themselves."
"Like Gilligan? That makes you... wait a minute... the Skipper?"
"You have to go out, but you don’t have to come back."
"Don’t be. At least they stopped the engines. We’ve just got to pray she doesn’t strand on whatever that is down there."
"And when the first landlord decided to stiff the first renter for his security deposit, your whole fucking class lost everybody’s respect."
"What, I should only trust good people? man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense."