The Bridges of Madison County Quotes

The human heart has a way of making itself large again even after it's been broken into a million pieces.

In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.

The old dreams were good dreams; they didn't work out but I'm glad I had them.

It's clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another.

Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.

And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.

Complex things are easy to do. Simplicity's the real challenge.

I sometimes have the feeling you've been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you've dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about.

So here I am walking around with another person inside of me. Though I think I put it better the day we parted when I said there is a third person we have created from the two of us. And I am stalked now by that other entity.

First you must have the images, then come the words.

There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. This is one of them.

Such physical matters were nice, yet, to him, intelligence and passion born of living, the ability to move and be moved by subtleties of the mind and spirit, were what really counted.

The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable - it could not have been any other way-- a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable.

The reality is not exactly what the song started out to be, but it's not a bad song.

He was an animal. A graceful, hard, male animal who did nothing overtly to dominate her yet dominated her completely, in the exact way she wanted that to happen at this moment.

Anyone who can feel that way about a woman is worth lovin himself.

I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea.

You make pictures, not take them? Yes. At least that's how I think of it. That's the difference between Sunday snapshooters and someone who does it for a living... I don't just take things as given, I try to make them into something that reflects my personal consciousness, my spirit. I try to find the poetry in the image.

Eventually, computers and robots will run things. Humans will manage those machines, but that doesn't require courage or strength, or any characteristics like those. In fact, men are outliving their usefulness.

Something I've never been able to adapt to, to understand is how they can lavish such love and care on the animals and then see them sold for slaughter. I don't dare say anything about it, though. Richard and his friends would be down on me in a flash. But there's some kind of cold, unfeeling contradiction in that business.

This kind of certainty comes but once in a lifetime.

And, man he cried when he talked. He cried big tears, the kind it takes an old man to cry, the kind it takes a saxophone to play.