- Allison Clarke: 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.
- Allison Clarke: People talk a lot as if the most important thing in life is to always see things for what they really are. But everything we do, every plan we make, is kind of a lie. We're closing our eyes and pretending that the day won't ever come when we won't need to make any more plans. Hope is the biggest lie there is, and it is the best. We have to keep going as if it all mattered, or else we wouldn't keep going at all.
- Allison Clarke: 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 on to that faith. It's hard not to wonder whose reasons these things happen for.
- Allison Clarke: Even when we know we'll never find the answers, we have to keep on asking questions.
- Allison Clarke: 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.
- Allison Clarke: 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.
- Allison Clarke: 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 of where you were going, how do you find the way from the person you've become to the one you know you could have been?
- Allison Clarke: 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 when 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 said to my mom, is as close as a kid should have to come to that sort of thing.
- [two simultaneous, different conversations]
- John, Alien Visitor: I'll try to put this in terms that you commonly use. I'm a scientist. We were all scientists. We came here to learn about your world. Our idea was to find out everything: your history, your biology, everything. We came here to learn. We're not that different from you, genetically, biologically. But what you call evolution has changed us. We see things in you that we no longer recognize in ourselves.
- Dr. Chet Wakeman: What do we know? They're this energy that can manifest itself in different ways: as the beings we've seen, as their crafts, as our thoughts. There's no right or wrong about them.
- John, Alien Visitor: The whole concept of right and wrong was... alien to us. The idea that the things we were doing were cruel...
- Dr. Chet Wakeman: They have no concept of kindness or cruelty. No way of seeing beyond the 'oneness' of all that energy...
- John, Alien Visitor: ...to the separateness, the uniqueness, your ability to hate, to love, to feel. You have compassion, as well as cruelty. We-we lack both. Or that is, the traits lie dormant...
- Dr. Chet Wakeman: ...in their brains. Like the animal that lives far back inside all of us. But an experience of something basic can awaken that primitive thing.
- John, Alien Visitor: And that's what happened. Your grandmother, Sally. She took me in and showed me a great kindness.
- Mary Crawford: Something could've touched one of them, something small and simple, and awakened this sense of what was missing. Something gone and half-remembered.
- John, Alien Visitor: And so our greatest experiment began.
- Mary Crawford: Could they put it back, this thing that had been bred out of them for eons and eons?
- John, Alien Visitor: Your emotional core, your strength, your feeling, and our more evolved consciousness. Could we bring these two together? If we could do this, we would have the next...
- Mary Crawford: ...step in the evolution of life.
- John, Alien Visitor: [Looking at Allie] The experiment was an unqualified success.
- Allison Clarke: 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?
- Allison Clarke: 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'll play all of our games beneath it.
- Mary Crawford: I know what you're thinking. You're saying to yourself, "I can get the girl by myself. Why do I need this bitch in the mix?"
- General Beers: I prefer not to use the term "in the mix."
- [Mary is using her laptop, when a video file of Chet appears]
- Dr. Chet Wakeman: Hiya, Tootz. I programmed this video file to send itself in twenty-four hours if I didn't delete it. I didn't delete it, so I guess you must've deleted me... Yeah, I sorta saw that one coming.
- Dr. Chet Wakeman: [to Mary, after his death] There's something I wanted to share with you. We're all so desperate for meaning, aren't we? All of us. You too, Mary, even if you think you're not. You want answers, and in that way, I think the aliens are gonna disappoint you. Here's the stone truth of it: They're still asking the same questions we are. No one is God here. We're all in the same boat.
- Allison Clarke: I didn't ask for any of this. I want to be a little girl. I just want to be a little girl.
- [discussing Apollo 13]
- Eric Crawford: Do you think our friends had anything to do with it?
- Maj. Owen Crawford: Between their preponderancy to intervene in our affairs, and the growing incompetence of NASA, I'd choose NASA... what?
- Eric Crawford: If you were still in charge of the project, you'd use this as evidence of an imminent alien threat.
- Maj. Owen Crawford: Probably.
- Maj. Owen Crawford: Can you imagine what would have happened to people if, in 1947, they thought that we were going to be invaded by aliens?
- Sam Crawford: Gee, I don't know... growth of the military-industrial complex? Trials to see if you were an alien sympathizer?
- Allison Clarke: Can I ask you something?
- Captain Walker: Sure.
- Allison Clarke: Are you mad at them?
- [Captain Walker shakes his head]
- Allison Clarke: But you'll fight with them just the same.
- Captain Walker: That's our job.
- Allison Clarke: ...Grown-ups are weird.
- [Col Crawford's two closest men talks about their boss]
- Howard Bowen: I've said this before Marty, but that is one nasty bastard.
- Allison Clarke: People say that when we grow up, we kick at everything we've been told, we rebel against the world our parents worked so hard to bring us into, that part of growing of 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.
- Charlie Keys: You got a nice move to the post. That kid yesterday thought he could get one past you, but you were right there.
- Allison Clarke: What I do is I fool myself. I make myself believe that I'm really going to cover. Because *I* believe it, he believes it.
- Charlie Keys: Then, how do you get yourself over to the post?
- Allison Clarke: I don't know. I'm afraid if I ever stop to think about it, it won't work anymore.
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