Annie Hall Quotes

Hey, Harvard makes mistakes too! Kissinger taught there!

Annie: You're seeing an analyst? Alvy: Just for 15 years. I'm giving him one more year and then I'm going to Lourdes.

Annie: Well, have you ever made love high? Alvy: Me? No. I - I, you know, If I have grass or alcohol or anything, I get unbearably wonderful. I get too, too wonderful for words. I don't know why you have to get high every time we make love. Annie: It relaxes me.

Annie: What's so great about New York? I mean, it's a dying city. You read "Death in Venice." Alvy: Hey, you didn't read "Death in Venice" till I bought it for you. Annie: That's right, that's right. You only gave me books with the word "death" in the titles.

I remember the staff at our public school. You know, we had a saying, uh, that those who can't do teach, and those who can't teach, teach gym. And, uh, those who couldn't do anything, I think, were assigned to our school.

You see conspiracies in everything.

[Annie sings] Seems like old times, having you to walk with, Seems like old times, having you to walk with, And it's still a thrill just to have my arms around you, Still the thrill that it was the day I found you, Seems like old times, dinner dates and flowers, Old times, staying up for hours, Making dreams come true, doing things we used to do, Seems like old times here with you...

[right after Annie parks the car with Alvy in it] Don't worry. We can walk to the curb from here.

Sun is bad for you. Everything our parents said was good is bad. Sun, milk, red meat... college.

Probably on their first date, right? Probably met by answering an ad in the New York Review of Books. "Thirtyish academic wishes to meet woman who's interested in Mozart, James Joyce, and sodomy."

Duane: Can I confess something? I tell you this as an artist, I think you'll understand. Sometimes when I'm driving... on the road at night... I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The... flames rising out of the flowing gasoline. Alvy: Right. Well, I have to - I have to go now, Duane, because I, I'm due back on the planet Earth.

Annie: Sometimes I ask myself how I'd stand up under torture. Alvy: You? You kiddin'? If the Gestapo would take away your Bloomingdale's charge card, you'd tell 'em everything.

Alvy: You - you play very well. Annie: Oh, yeah? So do you! Oh, God, whatta - whatta dumb thing to say, right? I mean, you say it, "You play well," and then right away I have to say "you play well". Oh, oh, God, Annie. Well, oh well, la-de-da, la-de-da, la-la. Yeah.

Annie: Hey, listen, what - what do you think? Do you think we should, uh, go to that - that party in Southampton tonight? Alvy: No, don't be silly. What - what do we need other people for? You know, we should - we should just turn out the lights, you know, and play hide the salam or something.

Annie: [talking about California] It's so clean out here. Alvy: That's because they don't throw their garbage away, they turn it into television shows.

Boy, if life were only like this!

Awards! They always give out awards! I can't believe it.

The only word for this is transplendent... it's transplendent!

Alvy: Let's go see "The Sorrow and the Pity". Annie: Oh, come on, we've seen it. I'm not in the mood to see a four-hour documentary on Nazis!

You know, you're always tryin' to get things to come out perfect in art; because, it's real difficult in life.

Alvy: I think you're pretty lucky I came along. Annie: Oh, really? Well, la-de-da! Alvy: La-de-da. If I - if anyone had ever told me that I would be taking out a girl who used expressions like "la-de-da".

Allison: Then everybody's in on the conspiracy? The FBI, and the CIA, and J. Edgar Hoover and oil companies and the Pentagon and the men's-room attendant at the White House? Alvy: I would leave out the men's-room attendant.

I don't want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light.

Alvy: Hey listen, gimme a kiss. Annie: Really? Alvy: Yeah, why not, because we're just gonna go home later, right, and then there's gonna be all that tension, we've never kissed before and I'll never know when to make the right move or anything. So we'll kiss now and get it over with, and then we'll go eat. We'll digest our food better.

Sylvia Plath - interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.

Oh my God, she's right. Why did I turn off Allison Portchnik? She was beautiful, she was willing. She was real intelligent. Is it the old Groucho Marx joke that I'm - I just don't want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member?

Alvy: Two minutes ago the Knicks are ahead 14 points and now they're ahead 2 points. Robin: Alvy, what is so fascinating about a group of pituitary cases trying to stuff the ball through a hoop? Alvy: What's fascinating is that it's physical. You know, it's one thing about intellectuals, they prove that you can be absolutely brilliant and have no idea what's going on.

Love is too weak a word for what I feel - I lurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you, two F's, yes I have to invent, of course I - I do, don't you think I do?

Annie and I broke up and I - I still can't get my mind around that. You know, I - I keep sifting the pieces of the relationship through my mind and - and examining my life and tryin' to figure out where did the screw-up come, you know, and a year ago we were in love.

You're a total paranoid.

Allison: I'm in the midst of doing my thesis. Alvy: On what? Allison: Political commitment in twentieth-century literature. Alvy: You, you, you're like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right, and the really, y'know, strike-oriented kind of, red diaper, stop me before I make a complete imbecile of myself. Allison: No, that was wonderful. I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.

Me? no, no. i-i couldn't make it that ni- my-my raccoon had hepatitis.

There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly. The... the other important joke, for me, is one that's usually attributed to Groucho Marx; but, I think it appears originally in Freud's "Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious," and it goes like this - I'm paraphrasing - um, "I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member." That's the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships with women.

Alvy: What are you depressed about? Annie: I missed my therapy, I overslept. Alvy: How can you possibly oversleep? Annie: The alarm clock. Alvy: You know what a hostile gesture that is to me?

Alvy: [says to the waitress] I'll have corned beef, please. Annie: [says to the waitress] I'm gonna have pastrami on white bread with mayonnaise, tomatoes and lettuce.

Annie: Some of her poems seem - neat. Alvy: Neat? Annie: Neat, yeah. Alvy: Uh, I hate to tell yuh, this is 1975, you know that "neat" went out, I would say, at the turn of the century.

I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.

After that, it got pretty late and we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. I realized what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was just knowing her. And I thought of that old joke: this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, 'Doc, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken.' And the doctor says, 'Well, why don't you turn him in?' The guy says, 'I would, but I need the eggs.' Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships: they're totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, and... but, I guess, we keep goin' through it because most of us... need the eggs.

Annie: [offers a joint to Alvy]Here, you want some? Alvy: No. I don't use any major hallucinogenics. I took a puff about five years ago at a party... I tried to take my pants off over my head.

Annie: Alvy, you're incapable of enjoying life, you know that? I mean you're like New York City. You're just this person. You're like this island unto yourself. Alvy: I can't enjoy anything unless everybody is. If one guy is starving someplace, that puts a crimp in my evening.

Lately the strangest things have been going through my mind, 'cause I turned forty, and I guess I'm going through a life crisis or something, I don't know. I - and I'm not worried about aging. I'm not one of those characters, you know. Although I'm balding slightly on top, that's about the worst you can say about me. I, uh, I think I'm gonna get better as I get older, you know?

Well, you ask a psychopath for advice, that's what happens...

Alvy: I haven't been myself since I quit smoking. Annie: oh when was that? Alvy: 16 years ago.

[Alvy killed two spiders and Annie starts crying] What's the matter? What are you sad about? What did you want me to do? Capture 'em and rehabilitate 'em?

Alvy: I'm all perspired and everything. Annie: Well, didn't you take a shower at the club? Alvy: Me? No, no, no. 'Cause I never - I never shower in a public place. Annie: Why not? Alvy: 'Cause I - I don't like to get naked in front of another man, you know - it's, uh, it's uh...

Alvy: I'm sorry, I - I can't, I - I - I've gotta see a picture exactly from the start to the finish, 'cause -'cause I'm anal. Annie: [chuckles]That's a polite word for what you are.

[Annie refers to a box of pin badges] I guess these are all yours, impeach ''Eisenhower'', impeach ''Nixon'', impeach ''Lyndon Johnson'', impeach Ronald Reagan''.

A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.

Honey, there's a spider in your bathroom the size of a Buick.

You know, I don't think I could take a mellow evening because I - I don't respond well to mellow. You know what I mean? I have a tendency to - if I get too mellow, I - I ripen and then rot, you know.

Annie, there's a big lobster behind the refrigerator. I can't get it out. This thing's heavy. Maybe if I put a little dish of butter sauce here with a nutcracker, it will run out the other side.

Boy, sometimes I wonder where my classmates are today.

I was thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final, you know. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me. When I was thrown out, my mother, who was an emotionally high-strung woman, locked herself in the bathroom and took an overdose of Mah-Jongg tiles. I was depressed at that time. I was in analysis. I was suicidal as a matter of fact and would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian, and, if you kill yourself, they make you pay for the sessions you miss.

Alvy: [shows up in a cab] Jesus, what'd you do, come by way of the Panama Canal? Annie: It's alright. I'm in a bad mood, okay? Alvy: Bad mood? I'm standing with the cast of "The Godfather."

Alvy: Has the picture started yet? Ticket Seller at Theatre: It started two minutes ago. Alvy: That's it! Forget it! I - I can't go in. Annie: Two minutes, Alvy. Alvy: No, I'm sorry, I can't do it. We - we've blown it already. I - you know, uh, I - I can't go in in the middle. Annie: In the middle? We'll only miss the titles. They're in Swedish.

They did not take me in the Army. I was, um, interestingly enough, I was, I was 4-P. Yes. In the, in the event of war, I'm a hostage.

Annie: Does this sound like a good course? Um, "Modern American Poetry"? Or, let's see now, maybe I should, uh, take "Introduction to the Novel." Alvy: Just don't take any course where they make you read Beowulf.

Alvy: I'm so tired of spending evenings making fake insights with people who work for "Dysentery." Robin: "Commentary." Alvy: Oh really? I had heard that "Commentary" and "Dissent" had merged and formed "Dysentery."

Are you going with a right-wing rock 'n roll star?