Six Degrees of Separation

Ouisa Kittredge (Stockard Channing) Chaos, control. Chaos, control. You like, you like?

Flan Kittredge (Donald Sutherland) Having a rich friend is like drowning in your family's lifeboats.

Flan Kittredge Why do you stay in South Africa? Geoffrey (Ian McKellen) One has to stay there. To educate the black workers. And we'll know we've been successful when they kill us. Ouisa Kittredge Oh, goodness. Flan Kittredge Planning the revolution that will destroy you. Ouisa Kittredge Putting your life on the line. Geoffrey We don't think of it like that. I wish you'd come and visit. Ouisa Kittredge Oh, would we visit you and sit in your gorgeous house, planning visits to the townships, demanding to see the poorest of the poor? "Oh, are you sure they're the worst off? I mean, we've come all this way. I mean, we don't want to see people just mildly victimized by apartheid. We demand shock." You know it doesn't seem right, sitting on the East Side, talking about revolution.

Paul (Will Smith) I believe the imagination is the passport that we create to help take us into the real world. I believe the imagination is merely another phrase for what is most uniquely us. Jung says, "The greatest sin is to be unconscious."

Paul It is the worst kind of yellowness to be so scared of yourself that you put blindfolds on rather than deal with yourself. To face ourselves--that's the hard thing. The imagination--that's God's gift, to make the act of self-examination bearable.

Paul You watch. It gives me a thrill to be looked at.

Flan Kittredge I thought, dreamt, remembered how easy it is for a painter to lose a painting. He paints and paints, works on a canvas for months, and then one day he loses it- -loses the structure, loses the sense of it. You lose the painting.

Paul The imagination. It's there to sort out your nightmare, to show you the exit from the maze of your nightmare, to transform the nightmare into dreams, that become your bedrock. If we do not listen to that voice, it dies, it shrivels, it vanishes. The imagination is not our escape. On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to.

Trent (Anthony Michael Hall) When rich people do something nice for you, you give 'em a pot of jam.

Ouisa Kittredge I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet.

Ouisa Kittredge Everyone is a new door opening into other worlds. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. But, to find the right six people...

Paul Every moment in life is a learning experience. Or what good is it, right?

Paul I was wondering if I could fuck you. Rick (Eric Thal) Man, I don't do things like that. Paul That's what makes it so nice. You don't.

Elizabeth (Heather Graham) "Quality of mercy is not strained"? Well, fuck you, quality of mercy!

Flan Kittredge Never bullshit a bullshitter.

Paul Did you see Donald Barthelme's obituary? He said that collage was the art form of the 20th century. Ouisa Kittredge Everything is somebody else's. Paul Not your children. Not your life. Ouisa Kittredge No, you got me there. That is mine. That is nobody else's. Paul You don't sound happy. Ouisa Kittredge There is so much you don't know. You are so smart and so stupid.

Paul I'll be treated with care if you take me to the police. If they don't know you're special, they kill you. Ouisa Kittredge Oh, I don't think they kill you. Paul Mrs. Louisa Kittredge, I am black. Ouisa Kittredge I will deliver you to them with kindness and affection.

Ouisa Kittredge And we turn him into an anecdote, to dine out on, like we're doing right now. But it was an experience. I will not turn him into an anecdote. How do we keep what happens to us? How do we fit it into life without turning it into an anecdote, with no teeth, and a punch line you'll mouth over and over, years to come: "Oh, that reminds me of the time that impostor came into our lives. Oh, tell the one about that boy." And we become these human jukeboxes, spilling out these anecdotes. But it was an experience. How do we keep the experience?

Ouisa Kittredge I am a collage of unaccounted-for brushstrokes. I am all random. Excuse me.