The Shawshank Redemption Quotes (1994)
Red: Get busy living… or get busy dying. That’s god damn right.
Red: They send you here for life… and that’s exactly what they take.
Red: There must be a con like me in every prison in America. I’m the guy who can get it for you. Cigarettes, a bag of reefer if that’s your thing, a bottle of brandy to celebrate your kid’s high school graduation, damn near anything within reason. Yes sir, I’m a regular Sears and Roebuck.
Red: And that’s how it came to pass that on the second-to-last day of the job, the convict crew that tarred the plate factory roof in the spring of ‘49 wound up sitting in a row at ten o’clock in the morning drinking icy cold, Bohemia-style beer. courtesy of the hardest screw that ever walked a turn at Shawshank State Prison.
Guard: Drink up while it’s cold, Ladies.
Red: The colossal prick even managed to sound magnanimous.
Red: And that’s how it came to pass. That on the second to last day of the job. The convict crew that tarred the plate factory roof in the spring of ‘49 wound up sitting in a row at 10:00 in the morning drinking icy cold Bohemian style beer.
Andy Dufresne: Can you get her?
Red: It’ll take a few weeks.
Andy Dufresne: Weeks?
Red: Well yeah, Andy. I don’t have her stuffed down my pants right now, sorry to say, but relax, I’ll get her.
Red: [narrating] Prison life consists of routine, and then more routine.
Red: In 1966 Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank Prison. All they found of him was a muddy set of prison clothes, a bar of soap, and an old rock hammer damn near worn down to the nub. I remember thinking it would take a man 600 years to tunnel through the wall with it. Ol’ Andy did it in less than twenty.
Red: You could argue he’d done it to curry favor with the guards. Or, maybe make a few friends among us cons. Me, I think he did it just to feel normal again, if only for a short while.
Andy: It’s a little place on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. That’s where I want to live the rest of my life. A warm place with no memory. Open up a little hotel right on the beach. Buy some worthless old boat and fix it up new. Take my guests out charter fishing…You know, in a place like that, I could use a man that knows how to get things.
Warden Samuel Norton (Bob Gunton): Lord it’s a miracle! Man up and vanished like a fart in the wind!
Red: I’d like to think that the last thing that went through his head, other than that bullet, was how the hell Andy Dufresne ever got the best of him.
Red: Andy? I guess we’re gettin’ to be friends, ain’t we?
Andy: I suppose we are.
Red: I ask a question? Why’d you do it?
Andy: I’m innocent, remember? Just like everybody else here.
Andy: What are you in for, Red?
Red: Murder. Same as you.
Andy: Innocent?
Red: The only guilty man in Shawshank.
Warden Samuel Norton: Do you enjoy working in the laundry?
Andy Dufresne: No sir, not especially.
Red: The man likes to play chess; let’s get him some rocks.
Red: I find I’m so excited I can barely sit still, or hold a thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only a free man can feel. A free man at the start of a long journey who’s conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend, and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.
Tommy Williams: I don’t read so good.
Andy Dufresne: Well.[pause]
Andy Dufresne: You don’t read so *well*. Uh, we’ll get to that.
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Salvation lies within.
Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.
Shawshank Redemption is the best movie I’ve ever seen my life. it gives us a lesson of hope and courage to survive.