And Don’t Call Me Shirley

Jim Silverstein is the author of Movie Quotes to Get You Through Life. The book contains more than 2000 quotes divided into categories such as “Compliments,” “Excuses,” and “Marriage.” Richard Harris (presumably not the actor), a psychology professor at Kansas State University, recently published a study on why people quote movies.

"People are doing it to feel good about themselves, to make others laugh, to make themselves laugh." Harris also says we do it to form solidarity with others.

That makes sense. I know that conversations with certain friends consist of almost nothing but movie quotes. We use it as a form of shorthand – a way of referencing a particular emotion, absurdity, or situation without having to parse it out. Of course, sometimes we just do it to kill time.

And who hasn’t felt that thrill of elation when someone hands you the perfect straight line, allowing you to unleash a favorite quote. I walk around hoping someone will ask “Hey…where do these stairs go?” so I can quote Ghostbusters. (A: “They go up.”)

I was watching Casablanca again recently, and that movie is jammed with quotable lines. “Here’s looking at you, kid” is ranked at #5 by the American Film Institute (“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” is #1), but it also gave us “I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”, “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine”, “Round up the usual suspects” (yes, that’s where that film got its name), “We'll always have Paris”, “it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” and my personal favorite: “Not an easy day to forget. I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.”

I’ll not get into another rant on people misquoting lines, but I will mention again how much it annoys me when people adopt a phrase from a movie trailer, bludgeoning it to death before you ever get to hear it in context, and completely killing the scene.

On the flip side, popular quotes can be mined by clever writers. This is one of my favorite commercials: