Requiem for a Dream — Movie Quotes

Spoken in her apartment during the film's central mother-and-son conversation, as Harry — himself an addict — confronts her about the amphetamines and finds he has no argument that touches the reason she takes them.

The thesis of the entire film in three sentences: existence confused with visibility, and love confused with being liked by strangers. It is also the moment Harry realizes his mother's problem is not the pills but the emptiness the pills are filling.

Part of the same kitchen-table monologue, delivered after she explains that she is old and alone and that no one needs her anymore.

A defense of her habit that is really a confession of loneliness. She is not describing a high but a reason to be alive, which is why nothing Harry says can reach her.

Bellowed from the television screen during Sara's program and reprised inside her hallucinations, where the studio audience's applause becomes the soundtrack of her breakdown.

The film's satire of motivational culture distilled into a chant — enthusiasm as a product, sold to people whose lives supply no reason for it. The self-help gospel and the dealer's pitch use the same cadence.

Sara cheerfully explains her diet-doctor regimen to Harry, mistaking his alarm for interest, in the scene where the two addictions in the film are laid side by side.

Domestic addiction described in the language of a recipe. The color-coded schedule sounds like harmless housekeeping, which is exactly the point: her dependency comes with a doctor's authority and a pretty palette.

Said to Marion in bed early in the film, during the split-screen intimacy sequence that shows two people together in the frame and already divided by a line down the middle of it.

The film's tenderest line and its title's meaning made literal: Marion is the dream that will be mourned. Harry can name what he loves precisely and still cannot protect it.