Category: The Shawshank Redemption

Red: Forty years I been asking permission to piss. I can’t squeeze a drop without say-so.

Red: You could argue he’d done it to curry favor with the guards. Or, maybe make a few friends among us cons. Me, I think he did it just to feel normal again, if only for a short while.

Red: Sometimes it makes me sad though– Andy being gone. 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. But still, the place you live in is that much more gray 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.

Andy: Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.

Red: I mean, really, how often do you look at a man’s shoes?

Andy: Get busy living, or get busy dying.

Heywood: And it’s Fat-ass by a nose!

Red: Prison life consists of routine, and then more routine.

Andy: It’s my life. Don’t you understand? It’s my life!

Warden Samuel Norton: I believe in two things: discipline and the Bible. Here you’ll receive both. Put your trust in the Lord; your ass belongs to me. Welcome to Shawshank.

Red: I must admit I didn’t think much of Andy first time I laid eyes on him; looked like a stiff breeze would blow him over. That was my first impression of the man.

Prosecutor: And that also is very convenient, isn’t it, Mr. Dufresne?
Andy: Since I am innocent of this crime, I find it decidedly inconvenient that the gun was never found.

Red: Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.

Red: 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, anyways.

Red: His first night in the joint, Andy Dufresne cost me two packs of cigarettes. He never made a sound.

Red: 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.

Andy: Here’s where it makes the most sense. You need it so you don’t forget. Forget that there are places in the world that aren’t made out of stone. That there’s a – there’s a – there’s something inside that’s yours, that they can’t touch.

Andy: That’s the beauty of music. They can’t take that away from you.