Cold Mountain (film)

Cold Mountain is a 2003 film based on Charles Frazier's novel, about how in the waning days of the American Civil War, a wounded soldier embarks on a perilous journey back home to Cold Mountain, North Carolina to reunite with his sweetheart.
 * Written and directed by Anthony Minghella.

Find your way home

Ada Monroe

 * To have traveled so far... From east to west, a thousand terrible miles; my feet treading all God's surface - his Ocean, his swamps, his slopes and ridges - to find myself at last a mark in the aching snow from whence I beheld through a blue haze a world of mountains piled upon mountains.
 * If you are fighting, stop fighting. If you are marching, stop marching. Come back to me. Come back to me is my request.
 * All this while I've been packing ice around my heart. How will I make it melt...?
 * [reading from Wuthering Heights: My love for Linton is like the foliage in the wood. Time will change it I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath, a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nellie, I AM Heathcliff! He's always, always on my mind. Not as a pleasure any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as part of my own being.

Inman

 * I could be at killing for days, my feet against the feet of my enemy. And I always killed him. He never killed me.
 * Maybe you can't see my face, but if you could see my inside, my whatever you want to call it, my spirit, that's the fear I have deeper than any gash on my neck. I think I'm ruined. They kept trying to put me in the ground, but I wasn't ready. But if I had goodness, I lost it. If I had anything tender in me I shot it dead.
 * She gave me a book. Ada Monroe. Man by the name of Bartram. Wrote about his travels. Sometimes just reading the name of a place near home - Sorell Cove, Bishop's Creek. Those places belonged to people before us, to the Cherokee - What did he call Cold Mountain? How can a name, not even a real name, break your heart? It's her...She's the place I'm heading. And I hardly know her. I hardly know her!

Ruby Thewes

 * Old Lady Swanger says you need help. Here I am!
 * I despise a flogging rooster.
 * If I cried one tear for my daddy I stole it off a crocodile!
 * Every piece of this is man's bullshit. They call this war a cloud over the land, but they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say, "Shit! Its rainin'!"
 * This war won't stand long. God won't let it stand this way long.

Maddy

 * There's a design for each and every one of us. You look at nature. Bird flies somewhere, picks up a seed, shits the seed out, plant grows. Bird's got a job, shit's got a job, seed's got a job.

Dialogue

 * Ada: Did you get my letters?
 * Inman: I got three letters. Carried them in the book you gave me, the Bartram.
 * Ada: I probably sent 103. Did you write to me?
 * Inman: Whenever I could. If you never got them I can summarize.
 * Ada: No, it's --
 * Inman: I pray you're well. I pray I'm in your thoughts. You are all that keeps me from sliding into some dark place.
 * Ada: But how did I keep you? We barely knew each other. A few moments --
 * Inman: A thousand moments! They're like a bag of tiny diamonds glittering in a black heart. Don't matter if they're real or things I made up. The shape of your neck. The way you felt under my hands when I pulled you to me.

[Inman has killed all the Home Guard except for Teague's vicious young lieutenant, Bosie; he has chased him up the mountain on horseback, cornering him on the slope above]
 * Inman: Come down from there!
 * Bosie: No sir- here's just fine.
 * Inman: I'll just shoot the horse out from under you.
 * Bosie: You ridin' Captain Teague's animal?
 * Inman: I am.
 * Bosie: He dead?
 * Inman: I hope so. (pause, both their horses walk along the mountainside) Well, gimme your gun and ride on home! I'm done fightin'- I'm sick of it!
 * Bosie: I give you my gun, you gonna shoot me dead!
 * Inman: I will not shoot you- but nor am I goin' down this mountain lookin' over my shoulder for you.
 * Bosie: That's what they call a conundrum. (pause) I tell you what I got on my side.
 * Inman: What you got on your side? (they both stop their horses)
 * Bosie:... The confidence of youth. (he draws his gun, he and Inman shoot each other)