Movie Info
Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams, Mads Mikkelsen, Tilda Swinton, Scott Adkins, Michael Stuhlbarg, Benedict Wong, Amy Landecker
Story: Marvel’s superhero fantasy adventure directed by Scott Derrickson. Doctor Strange (2016) centers on Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) a brilliant but arrogant and conceited neurosurgeon, who after being injured in a car accident that ruins his career sets out on a journey of healing and uncovers the hidden world of magic where he encounters the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton), who later becomes Strange’s mentor in the mystic arts.
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Top Doctor Strange Quotes
Dr. Christine Palmer: You know, you didn’t have to humiliate him in front of everyone.
Dr. Stephen Strange: I didn’t have to save his patient, either. But I sometimes just can’t help myself.
Dr. Christine Palmer: I have a very strict rule against dating colleagues.
Dr. Stephen Strange: Oh, really?
Dr. Christine Palmer: I call it the “Strange Policy”.
Dr. Stephen Strange: Oh, well, good, I’m glad something’s named after me. I invented a laminectomy procedure. And yet, somehow no one seems to want to call it the “Strange Technique”.
Dr. Christine Palmer: Some things just can’t be fixed.
Dr. Stephen Strange: [to Pangborn] You came back from a place there’s no way back from. I’m trying to find my own way back.
Mordo: [to Strange] I once stood in your place. And I, too, was disrespectful. So, might I offer you some advice? Forget everything you think you know.
Dr. Stephen Strange: So, you’ve figured out a way to reprogram nerve cells to self-heal?
The Ancient One: No, Mr. Strange. I know how to reorient the spirit to better heal the body.
The Ancient One: [to Strange] You’re a man looking at the world through a keyhole, and you’ve spent your whole life trying to widen that keyhole, to see more, to know more. And now, on hearing that it can be widened, in ways you can’t imagine you reject the possibility.
The Ancient One: I pushed your astral form out of your physical form.
Dr. Stephen Strange: What’s in that tea? Psilocybin? LSD?
The Ancient One: It’s just tea, with a little honey.
The Ancient One: [as Strange is going through alternate dimensions] You think you know how the world works? You think that this material universe is all there is? What is real? What mysteries lie beyond the reach of your senses? At the root of existence mind and matter meet. Thoughts shape reality.
The Ancient One: [to Strange] This universe is only one of an infinite number. Worlds without end. Some benevolent and life giving. Others filled with malice and hunger. Dark places where powers older than time lie ravenous and waiting. Who are you in this vast Multiverse, Mr. Strange?
The Ancient One: [as she brings Strange back into his body] Have you seen that before in a gift shop?
Dr. Stephen Strange: Teach me.
The Ancient One: No.
Mordo: You gave me the power to defeat my demons. And to live within the natural law.
The Ancient One: We never lose our demons, Mordo. We only learn to live above them.
Dr. Stephen Strange: What’s this? My mantra?
Mordo: The Wi-Fi password. We’re not savages.
The Ancient One: We harness energy drawn from other dimensions of the Multiverse to cast spell, to conjure shields, and weapons, to make magic.
Dr. Stephen Strange: Wong. Just Wong? Like Adele? Or Aristotle. Drake. Bono. Eminem.
Wong: How’s your Sanskrit?
Dr. Stephen Strange: I’m fluent in Google Translate.
Dr. Stephen Strange: Thank you for the books, and for the horrifying story, and for the threat upon my life.
The Ancient One: You cannot beat a river into submission. You have to surrender to its current and use its power as your own.
Dr. Stephen Strange: I control it by surrendering control? That doesn’t make any sense.
The Ancient One: Not everything does. Not everything has to.
The Ancient One: Surrender, Stephen. Silence your ego, and your power will rise.
The Ancient One: Once, in this room, you begged me to let you learn. Now, I’m told you question every lesson, preferring to teach yourself.
Dr. Stephen Strange: Once, in this room, you told me to open my eye. Now, I’m being told to blindly accept rules, that make no sense.
The Ancient One: [to Strange] Learning of an infinite Multiverse includes learning of infinite dangers. If I told you everything else that you don’t already know, you’d run from here in terror.
Mordo: No more questions.
Dr. Stephen Strange: What’s that?
Mordo: That’s a question.
Mordo: Temporal manipulations can create branches in time. Unstable dimensional openings. Spatial paradoxes! Time loops! You want to get stuck reliving the same moment over and over forever or never having existed at all?
Dr. Stephen Strange: They really should put the warnings before the spell.
Mordo: You were born for the mystic arts.
Dr. Stephen Strange: And yet my hands still shake.
Mordo: For now, yes.
Dr. Stephen Strange: Not forever?
Mordo: We’re not prophets.
Kaecilius: How long have you been at Kamar-Taj, Mister…
Dr. Stephen Strange: Doctor.
Kaecilius: Mister Doctor?
Dr. Stephen Strange: It’s Strange.
Kaecilius: Maybe. Who am I to judge?
Kaecilius: People think in terms of good and evil, when really time is the true enemy of us all. Time kills everything.
Dr. Christine Palmer: After all this time, you just show up here, flying out of your body.
Dr. Stephen Strange: Yeah, I know. I missed you too, by the way.
Dr. Stephen Strange: I went to a place called Kamar-Taj and I talked to someone called “The Ancient One”.
Dr. Christine Palmer: Oh. So you joined a cult.
Dr. Stephen Strange: No, I didn’t. No, not exactly. No. They did teach me to tap into powers that I never even knew existed.
Dr. Christine Palmer: Yeah. That sounds like a cult.
Dr. Stephen Strange: It’s not a cult.
Dr. Christine Palmer: Well, that’s what a cultist would say.
Dr. Stephen Strange: It’s Doctor Strange. Not Master Strange. Not Mister Strange. Doctor Strange. When I became a doctor, I swore an oath to do no harm. And I have just killed a man! I’m not doing that again.
Dr. Stephen Strange: I became a doctor to save lives, not take them.
The Ancient One: You became a doctor to save one life above all others. Your own.
Dr. Stephen Strange: Still seeing through me, are you?
The Ancient One: I see what I’ve always seen, your over-inflated ego. You want to go back to the delusion that you can control anything, even death, which no one can control. Not even the great Doctor Stephen Strange.
Dr. Stephen Strange: You lack imagination.
Mordo: No, Stephen. You lack a spine.
The Ancient One: I’ve spent so many years peering through time, looking at this exact moment. But I can’t see past it. I’ve prevented countless, terrible futures. And after each one, there’s always another. And they all lead here, but never further.
Dr. Stephen Strange: You think this is where you die.
The Ancient One: You have such a capacity for goodness. You always excelled, but not because you craved success, but because of your fear of failure.
Dr. Stephen Strange: That’s what made me a great doctor.
The Ancient One: It’s precisely what kept you from greatness. Arrogance and fear still keep you from learning the simplest and most significant lesson of all.
Dr. Stephen Strange: Which is?
The Ancient One: It’s not about you.
Dr. Stephen Strange: So I could have my hands back again? My old life?
The Ancient One: You could. And the world would be all the lesser for it.
The Ancient One: Sometimes one must break the rule in order to serve the greater good.
Dr. Stephen Strange: I’m not ready.
The Ancient One: No one ever is. We don’t get to choose our time. Death is what gives life meaning. To know your days are numbered. Your time is short.
The Ancient One: You’d think after all this time I’d be ready, but look at me. Stretching one moment out into a thousand just so that I can watch the snow.
Dr. Stephen Strange: Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain.
Dormammu: You cannot do this forever.
Dr. Stephen Strange: Actually, I can. This is how things are now. You and me, trapped in this moment, endlessly.
Dormammu: Then you will spend eternity dying.
Dr. Stephen Strange: Yes. But everyone on Earth will live.
Dormammu: But you will suffer.
Dr. Stephen Strange: Pain is an old friend.
Dormammu: You will never win.
Dr. Stephen Strange: No, but I can lose again, and again, and again, and again, forever. And that makes you my prisoner.
Mordo: You still think there will be no consequences, Strange? No price to pay? We broke our rules, just like her. The bill comes due. Always! A reckoning.
Dr. Stephen Strange: [mid-credit lines] Tea?
Thor: I don’t drink tea.
Dr. Stephen Strange: What do you drink?
Thor: Not tea.