I loved this show. I finished watching it and went and got my cousin and then watched it again with him. I loved the imagery, the storyline, the acting – but what I mainly loved was the dialogue. Here are the bits of dialogue that jumped out at me as I watched.
Cohle: Certain linguistic anthropologists think that religion is a language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain. Dulls critical thinking.
Cohle: If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward then, brother, that person is a piece of shit. And I’d like to get as many of them out in the open as possible. You gotta get together and tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the goddamn day? What’s that say about your reality?
Cohle: I know who I am. And after all these years, there’s a victory in that.
Maggie Hart: I said something about forgiveness and he said there was no such thing as forgiveness, that people just have short memories.
Hart: See, infidelity is one kind of sin, but my true failure was inattention.
Maggie Hart: Rust knew exactly who he was and there was no talking him out of it. You know, Marty’s single big problem was that he never really knew himself, so he never really knew what to want.
Cohle: To realize that all your life—you know, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain—it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream. A dream that you had inside a locked room. A dream about being a person… And like a lot of dreams there’s a monster at the end of it.
Cohle: Death created time to grow the things that it would kill.
Cohle: Life’s barely long enough to get good at one thing. So be careful what you get good at.
Rust: I tell you Marty I been up in that room looking out those windows every night here just thinking, it’s just one story. The oldest.
Marty: What’s that?
Rust: Light versus dark.
Marty: Well, I know we ain’t in Alaska, but it appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.
Rust: Yeah, you’re right about that. …
Rust: You’re looking at it wrong, the sky thing.
Marty: How’s that?
Rust: Well, once there was only dark. You ask me, the light’s winning.