Some movie lines are so iconic that they have a way of escaping the screen and ending up in everyday conversation, to the point that we still use them now, all these decades later.
‘I’ll be back’
He says it so casually. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator walks into a Los Angeles police station looking for Sarah Connor in the hit 1984 film. He’s told he can’t see her, so he looks around for a moment and says those famous three words. ‘I’ll be back.’ Then he leaves.
The words wouldn’t have been that important if they were just said by themselves, but it’s what happens next that really matters. He returns to the scene a short while later by driving a car straight through the station entrance. He’s a man of his word, clearly.
‘You talking to me?’
What makes the scene so odd here in Taxi Driver is that nobody’s actually talking to Travis Bickle. No, Robert De Niro’s character just says this line while he’s alone in his apartment and staring at himself in a mirror. He’s practicing confrontations while handling a concealed gun.
That’s when he says, ‘You talking to me?’ and becomes part of movie history. You might be surprised to know that this scene wasn’t even mapped out word for word beforehand. No, director Martin Scorsese said De Niro improvised the mirror sequence and came up with the line while filming it. He’s just that good.
‘Show me the money’
The scene in Jerry Maguire where the titular character says this line starts as a phone call. It becomes ridiculous way too quickly. Tom Cruise plays Jerry Maguire and is desperately trying to hold onto football player Rod Tidwell as a client after his career takes a nosedive.
Rod, played by Cuba Gooding Jr., says he’ll do it, but only on one condition. Jerry has to yell ‘Show me the money!’ louder and louder. It gets to the point where both men are shouting into their phones, and moviegoers everywhere would remember how silly this moment was.
‘You can’t handle the truth’
Tom Cruise also appeared in A Few Good Men, although he’s not the one who said this famous line. It’s Jack Nicholson, who explodes in the courtroom and says, ‘You can’t handle the truth.’ The scene takes place after Cruise’s Daniel Kaffee has been questioning Nicholson’s Colonel Nathan Jessep.
He wants to know whether Jessep was involved in the death of Marine William Santiago. He keeps pushing and pushing until Jessep says those iconic words. The line comes directly from Aaron Sorkin’s stage play, but really, Jack Nicholson made it what it is.
‘Nobody puts Baby in a corner’
There are so many memorable moments from Dirty Dancing, but this has to be one of the most famous ones. It’s near the end, when Patrick Swayze’s character walks over to the Houseman family table.
Baby is sitting with her parents, and he says, ‘Nobody puts Baby in a corner.’ Then he takes her toward the stage for their final dance. It’s a line that reminds us to stand up for our own worth and to refuse to allow someone else to put us in a box. What a moment.
‘E.T. phone home’
You honestly can’t get more famous than the line ‘E.T. phone home.’ It’s from the heartwarming film about the extraterrestrial E.T. who is trying to find a way to communicate with his own species. The stranded alien spends time with Elliott and manages to pick up some language.
He starts using ‘phone home.’ That’s exactly what the children help him to do, they create a device to contact his own people. It’s not like we’ll have many opportunities to use this exact wording in real life, but still, the line is iconic.
‘Wax on, wax off’
Daniel LaRusso thinks he’s going to learn karate in The Karate Kid. At least, he does at first, but instead of teaching him directly, Mr. Miyagi gives him lots of chores. One of these involves washing and waxing cars using very particular arm movements while saying ‘wax on, wax off.’
Those words seem so unimportant, and even Daniel gets annoyed about doing this work. He thinks it’s free labor. So, Miyagi starts throwing punches at him and tells Daniel to use those same movements to defend. LaRusso now understands that the car waxing makes a lot more sense.
‘Say hello to my little friend’
It’s towards the end of Scarface that we get this iconic line from Tony Montana. It’s during the scene when armed attackers are closing in on his mansion, and Al Pacino’s character grabs a rifle fitted with a grenade launcher.
He shouts, “Say hello to my little friend.” That’s when film history is made. Yes, Montana fires through a door as the gunfight erupts around him, and it’s really one of those lines where the setup matters as much as the words. It’s such a famous scene.
‘May the Force be with you’
Everyone knows the line, ‘May the Force be with you,’ even people who aren’t Star Wars fans. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that, actually, Obi-Wan Kenobi isn’t the first person to say it in Star Wars. No, it’s Rebel General Jan Dodonna who uses the phrase first.
He says it while sending pilots off to attack the Death Star, and then Harrison Ford’s Han Solo later says it to Luke just before the battle begins. It was like saying ‘good luck’ in the movie and has become a staple in pop culture ever since.
‘I see dead people’
The creepiest part about this line from The Sixth Sense is that Haley Joel Osment’s character, Cole Sear, says it so calmly. He tells Malcolm Crowe, ‘I see dead people,’ and then tells him that some of the dead people don’t even know they’re dead.
Bruce Willis doesn’t even need to move or respond for the scene to work. It’s so unsettling all by itself, and it’s kind of strange when you remember that Osment was only 10 years old when he said it. So young, and yet, so talented.
‘As if!’
Cher Horowitz says “As if!” quite a few times in Clueless, and that’s probably why it’s so memorable. Actress Alicia Silverstone delivers it in such a stereotypical Valley Girl way, it’s hard to forget it.
Writer-director Amy Heckerling actually said during an interview that she’d heard the expression from people she knew while working on the movie. It wasn’t exactly a line created for Cher, but still, she managed to make it all her own.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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