The Shawshank Redemption

The Shawshank Redemption (1994) Directed by: Frank Darabont

Based on the Stephen King novella: Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (1982)

• "I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don't want to know. Some things are better left unsaid. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can't expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was as if some beautiful bird had flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free." - Red

• "I have to remind myself that some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice. Still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they're gone. I guess I just miss my friend." - Red

• "I find I'm so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose 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." - Red

• "Geology is the study of pressure and time. Thats all it takes really... pressure... and time... That, and big goddamn poster."

• "Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free." - Poster of the movie

• "Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane."

• "The first night's the toughest, no doubt about it. They march you in naked as the day you were born, skin burning and half blind from that delousing shit they throw on you, and when they put you in that cell... and those bars slam home...that's when you know it's for real. A whole life blown away in the blink of an eye. Nothing left but all the time in the world to think about it."

• "These walls are kind of funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, gets so you depend on them. That's institutionalized. They send you here for life, that's exactly what they take. The part that counts, anyway."

• "The funny thing is - on the outside, I was an honest man, straight as an arrow. I had to come to prison to be a crook."

• "Andy Dufresne - who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side."

• "Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies."

• "There's not a day goes by I don't feel regret. Not because I'm in here [jail], or because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then then, a young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try and talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are. But I can't. That kid's long gone and this old man is all that's left. I got to live with that. Rehabilitated? It's just a bullshit word. So you go on and stamp your form, sonny, and stop wasting my time. Because to tell you the truth, I don't give a shit."

• "Get busy living, or get busy dying."