Movie Quotes for Special Occasions: Toasts and Tributes for Weddings, Graduations, Birthdays and All of Life's Special Moments

By James Scheibli

James Scheibli is one of the head writers BayArea.com, the newspaper conglomerate that included the Oakland Tribune, now East Bay Times, and is the editor of their popular entertainment newsletter Pop culture maven and author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mango
• Release date: Mar 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642500776

James Scheibli

James Scheibli was raised on the pop-culture relics worshipped by his family. From an early age, he was emerged in the works of Spielberg, Lucas, and Coppola. By the time he hit his teens, he was dissecting Kubrick, Kurosawa, and Kieslowski. Under the tutelage of the great film historian and Orson Welles collaborator, Joe McBride, James obtained his BA in Cinema & English Literature and ventured out into the world… …where he was promptly pushed into marketing and social media. As a social media manager and contributor for BayArea.com, he is able to bring his expertise of film and pop culture to the masses with all the humor his editor will allow him.

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Copyright © 2020 James Scheibli.

Published by Mango Publishing Group, a division of Mango Media Inc.

Cover Design: Elina Diaz

Cover Photo/illustration: www.shutterstock.com/topform

Layout & Design: Elina Diaz

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Movie Quotes for Special Occasions: Toasts and Tributes for Weddings, Graduations, Birthdays and All of Life's Special Moments

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2019944215

ISBN: (print) 978-1-64250-076-9, (ebook) 978-1-64250-077-6

BISAC category code BIASC: PER004040—PERFORMING ARTS / Film / Reference

Printed in the United States of America

For Audrey and Luke:

You’re already smarter than I am… and that’s just not fair.

(And just in case he’s reading)

For Tom Hanks:

Let’s do lunch, maybe an A’s game. East Bay repping East Bay.

There’s nothing more exciting and daunting than the blank page. Oh, that’s good. Maybe I’ll do a book of quotes.

—Principal Brown (Jason Sudeikis), Booksmart (2019)

Table of Contents

Introduction

1 Birthdays

2 Motivation & Well Wishes

3 Getting Hitched: Engagement & Marriage

4 Parenting & Newborns

5 The Holidays

6 Back to School

7 Retirement

8 In Memoriam

Epilogue: Thanks

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Introduction

The last time I sat down to put something like this together, I thought I’d really make an event of it. In a bit of arrogance that truly escaped me at the time, I decided to propose to my wife in the dedication for my first published work. How perfect, right? A book of quotes to be used for weddings (and other events), and here I was starting down the road to my own wedding ceremony. Luckily, she said yes. I’m keenly aware of how different the tone of this introduction would have been had she not…

As we told people of our engagement, most noted that I had a leg up on my speech because I’d literally written the book on it. How wrong they were. Seeing my wife in her wedding dress for the first time taught me that. My witty, beautiful vows were erased in a single instant. Gone was the proud, cocksure, partially-balding man in a snazzy suit. In his place was a humble, grateful, partially-balding man in a snazzy suit. I wrote down my vows, but to this day I haven’t looked back at what I wrote. Instead, I live in that moment as it was.

You see, nothing ever truly prepares us for the defining moments of our lives. Every single moment presents an infinite amount of possibilities for things to go wrong. Or right. One decision could lead to a myriad of alternative actions and reactions. One false step could lead to laughter, while another could give rise to tears. No matter how much we prepare and rehearse and memorize, we never really know what will happen when it’s time to speak up. For me, it was the realization that nothing I had written or planned to say could ever match what I felt at that moment. I’d like to think that every now and then we truly nail what we mean to say. My wife nailed her vows. And she did so because for all the quotes I’d thrown at her over the years, for all the movies I made her watch for the outstanding dialogue, for all the emphasis I put on other people’s words, it was her truth that spoke most to me.

So when it came time to write the sequel, I took a different approach. In this book, you’ll certainly find a large variety of funny, moving, and inspiring lines from movies you’ve seen a million times as well as some you’ve never even heard of. The quotes selected for this volume will guide you to what you truly wish to say for moments in your life that require you to speak up. You might not use them word-for-word. Hell, you might forget them altogether the moment you open your mouth. But hopefully they’ll lead you to a truth much more interesting than a Harold Ramis one-liner. Movies offer us not a series of images and words to steal or use as references, but rather the opportunity to engage in a shared human connection through art. Each time we sit down in a dimmed theater, we are secretly connecting with the people around us. Not only that, but each of us is secretly forming a massive community of other humans that have shared that same experience, sometimes millions of miles away. As you read over the quotes in this book, allow your emotions, reactions, and, most importantly, memories to gather together in the net of your soul for you to pick over at your leisure. Toss the small fish back, but keep the big ones—the ones you were looking for (if you find them, of course).

To kick us off, a gem about life, the movies, and why we love both…

Pangzi: Life is a mixture of happy and sad things. Movies are so lifelike… that’s why we love them.

Ting-Ting: Then who needs movies? Just stay home and live life.

Pangzi: My uncle says we live three times as long since man invented movies.

Ting-Ting: How can that be?

Pangzi: It means movies give us twice what we get from daily life.

—Pangzi (Pang Chang Yu) & Ting-Ting

(Kelly Lee), Yi Yi (2000)

1

Birthdays

Birthdays really are the most perplexing celebration for both young and old. We spend our youth eagerly looking forward to each milestone that moves us closer to adulthood (i.e., independence). When we turn ten, it’s the double-digit milestone. Then a few years later, we celebrate the ascension into society proper, whether that be in the form of a Bar or Bat mitzvah, Quinceañera, or Sweet Sixteen party. At eighteen, you are legally allowed to vote, smoke, and buy a gun on your own (how is this not the traditional party milestone?). Twenty-one brings about your access to booze. And then following what seems like an eternity of waiting, at twenty-five you can finally rent a car. It’s at this very moment, at the twenty-fifth birthday party held in the lobby waiting area of a Hertz Rent-A-Car, that you realize it’s all downhill.

The Avett Brothers have a delightfully upbeat little ditty about the follies of adulthood in which they proclaim, For every year of knowledge gained is a negative year I’ve earned. We spend two decades growing and growing and growing only to discover that we’ll spend the next sixty shrinking—if we’re lucky.

Films about birthdays usually are about how they go terribly wrong. Birthday wishes go astray, family members forget our birthday, or sometimes we just hate the fact that we’re growing older. It seems that the universal narrative about celebrating a birthday is that it’s just a reminder that you’re one year closer to death.

This might all sound bleak, but take a close enough look and you’ll see the truth. While knowledge helps us understand how limited our time is, wisdom comes from embracing the finite. I encourage you to celebrate every birthday like a teen counting down the days to their inevitable independence. Celebrate like someone who just turned old enough to legally have a drink. Celebrate like somebody who gets to start collecting social security this year. Just celebrate. Life is too short, dammit!

Not a Kid Anymore: Symbolic Milestones

Storytellers have always been fascinated with the journey into adulthood. The Bildungsroman is a staple of popular storytelling. It appears in every medium, every literary era, and every culture on the planet. From Truffaut to Spielberg