Cold Mountain 2003 quotes

Ada

Did you get my letters?

Inman

I got three letters. Carried them in the book you gave me, the Bartram.

Ada

I probably sent 103. Did you write to me?

Inman

Whenever I could. If you never got them I can summarize.

Ada

No, it's --

Inman

I pray you're well. I pray I'm in your thoughts. You are all that keeps me from sliding into some dark place.

Ada

But how did I keep you? We barely knew each other. A few moments --

Inman

A thousand moments! They're like a bag of tiny diamonds glittering in a black heart. Don't matter if they're real or things I made up. The shape of your neck. The way you felt under my hands when I pulled you to me.

Inman

Come down from there!

Bosie

No sir- here's just fine.

Inman

I'll just shoot the horse out from under you.

Bosie

You ridin' Captain Teague's animal?

Inman

I am.

Bosie

He dead?

Inman

I hope so. [Pause, both their horses walk along the mountainside] Well, gimme your gun and ride on home! I'm done fightin'- I'm sick of it!

Bosie

I give you my gun, you gonna shoot me dead!

Inman

I will not shoot you- but nor am I goin' down this mountain lookin' over my shoulder for you.

Bosie

That's what they call a conundrum. [Pause] I tell you what I got on my side.

Inman

What you got on your side? [They both stop their horses]

Bosie

... The confidence of youth. [He draws his gun, he and Inman shoot each other]

Ada Monroe

All this while I've been packing ice around my heart. How will I make it melt?

Ruby Thewes

Every piece of this is man's bullshit. They call this war a cloud over the land, but they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say, "Shit! Its rainin'!"

Inman

I could be at killing for days, my feet against the feet of my enemy. And I always killed him. He never killed me.

Ruby Thewes

I despise a flogging rooster.

Oakley

I'm reachin' Cold Mountain before you.

Ruby Thewes

If I cried one tear for my daddy I stoled it off a crocodile!

Ada Monroe

If you are fighting, stop fighting. If you are marching, stop marching. Come back to me. Come back to me is my request.

Inman

Maybe you can't see my face, but if you could see my inside, my whatever you want to call it, my spirit, that's the fear I have deeper than any gash on my neck. I think I'm ruined. They kept trying to put me in the ground, but I wasn't ready. But if I had goodness, I lost it. If I had anything tender in me I shot it dead.

Ruby Thewes

Old Lady Swanger says you need help. Here I am!

Inman

She gave me a book. Ada Monroe. Man by the name of Bartram. Wrote about his travels. Sometimes just reading the name of a place near home - Sorell Cove, Fire Scale Ridge - enough to break your heart. Thing is, I've been thinking - those places belonged to people before us, to the Indian - What did he call Cold Mountain? How can a name, not even the real name, break your heart? It's her...She's the place I'm heading. And I hardly know her. I hardly know her!

Maddy

There's a design for each and every one of us. You look at nature. Bird flies somewhere, picks up a seed, shits the seed out, plant grows. Bird's got a job, shit's got a job, seed's got a job.

Ruby Thewes

This war won't stand long. God won't let it stand this way long.

Ada Monroe

To have traveled so far... From east to west, a thousand terrible miles; my feet treading all God's surface - his Ocean, his swamps, his slopes and ridges - to find myself at last a mark in the aching snow from whence I beheld through a blue haze a world of mountains piled upon mountains.