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Home / Best Quotes / Women Talking (2022) Best Movie Quotes

Women Talking (2022) Best Movie Quotes

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Starring: Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Ben Whishaw, Frances McDormand, Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy, Michelle McLeod, Emily Mitchell, Liv McNeil, Kate Hallett

OUR RATING: ★★★☆☆

Story:

Drama written and directed by Sarah Polley. Women Talking (2022) centers on the women of an isolated religious community as they grapple with reconciling their reality with their faith.

 

Our Favorite Quotes:

'Freedom is good. It is better than slavery. Forgiveness is good. It's better than revenge. And hope for the unknown is good. It is better than hatred of the familiar.' - Ona (Women Talking) Click To Tweet

 

Best Quotes


 

Autje: This story ends before you were born.


 

Autje: I used to wonder who I would be if it hadn’t happened to me. I used to miss the person I might have been. I don’t anymore. Because it’s doomsday and a call to prayer. It’s both.


 

Autje: We were given two days to forgive the attackers before they returned. If we did not forgive them, we would be ordered to leave the colony and be denied entry into the Kingdom of Heaven.


 

Neitje: Do nothing.
Salome: Stay and fight.
Neitje, Salome: Leave.


 

Autje: Girls in our colony had very little schooling. We hardly knew how to read or to write. But that day, we learned how to vote.


 

Autje: The vote was tied between staying and fighting, or leaving.


 

Autje: We only had twenty-four hours to imagine what world you would be born into.


 

Scarface Janz: It is a part of our faith to forgive. We have always forgiven those who have wronged us. Why not now?
Salome: Because now we know better.

 

'Find out where you can be of help and leave what you can't help behind.' - Autje (Women Talking) Click To Tweet

 

Mariche: We will be forced to leave the colony if we don’t forgive the men. How will the Lord, when he arrives, find the women, if we aren’t in the colony.
Salome: Jesus was able to return to life, live for thousands of years, and then drop down to Earth from Heaven to scoop up his supporters. Surely he’d also be able to locate a few women who left the colony.


 

Salome: I cannot forgive them. I will never forgive them.


 

Scarface Janz: We have everything we want here.
Salome: No. Want less.


 

Scarface Janz: Does entering the Kingdom of Heaven mean nothing to any of you?
Ona: Surely, there must be something worth living for in this life. Not only the next.


 

Autje: Your grandmother used to say, “Find out where you can be of help and leave what you can’t help behind.” I think that’s easier when you’re old like her.

 

'I think that it is possible to leave something or someone in one frame of mind and arrive elsewhere in another entirely unexpected frame of mind.' - August (Women Talking) Click To Tweet

 

Agata: So we must decide now to stay and fight, or leave. Those are the options in front of us. We will not do nothing.


 

Greta: I want to talk about my horses, Ruth and Cheryl. When Ruth and Cheryl are frightened by Dueck’s dogs on the mile road that leads to the church, their initial instinct is to bolt. These horses don’t organize meetings to decide what they will do. They run.
Agata: But, Greta, we are not animals.
Greta: We have been preyed upon like animals. Maybe we should respond like animals.


 

Agata: In my lifetime, I have seen horses confront angry dogs and try to stomp them to death. Animals don’t always flee.
Salome: Is this how we want to teach our daughters to defend themselves. By fleeing?
Greta: Not fleeing, but leaving. Now, I was just talking about leaving.
Salome: I would rather stand my ground and shoot each man in the heart and bury him in a pit than flee. And I’ll deal with God’s wrath if I have to.


 

Agata: “Leaving” and “fleeing” are different words with different meanings. They each say something about us.

 

'Is forgiveness that's forced upon us true forgiveness?' - Ona (Women Talking) Click To Tweet

 

Mejal: I want to stay and fight.
Mariche: But won’t we lose the fight to the men and be forced to forgive them anyway?
Salome: I want to stay and fight too.
Mariche: No one’s surprised that you do. All you do is fight.


 

Mariche: None of you will listen to reason.
Salome: Well, why are you here with us? Why are you still here with us, if that is what you believe? Just leave with the rest of the “do nothing” women.
Greta: She is my daughter. And I want her here with us.


 

Ona: Is forgiveness that’s forced upon us true forgiveness?
Salome: Keep nonsense like that to yourself please.


 

Autje: Many of us saw ourselves from above. I’m not sure if it was God and we were seeing ourselves through his eyes. Or if we just couldn’t be there. In our own bodies.


 

Autje: Where I come from, where your mother comes from, we didn’t talk about our bodies. So when something like this happened there was no language for it. And without language for it, there was a gaping silence. And in that gaping silence was the real horror.

 

'The only certainty we'll know is uncertainty, no matter where we are.' - Salome (Women Talking) Click To Tweet

 

Autje: This is never going to end.
Neitje: We’ll be dead and they’ll still be talking.
Autje: Or worse. We’ll have to live through it.


 

Agata: We could create the possibility of a new order right here in a place that is familiar to us.
Salome: Not simply familiar, but a place that is ours.


 

Mejal: Do we need to write the cons? Isn’t it obvious that we must stay and fight?
Greta: Cons. We won’t be forgiven.


 

Ona: Would it be a good idea before we list the pros and cons of “staying and fighting” to talk about exactly what it is we’re fighting for?
Salome: It’s obvious. We are fighting for our safety and for our freedom from attacks.
Ona: But what would that mean to us? Perhaps we need a statement which describes what we want the colony to be like after winning the fight. Perhaps we need to understand more what it is we are fighting to achieve, not only what we are fighting to destroy.

 

'Why does love, the absence of love, the end of love, the need for love, result in so much violence?' - Ona (Women Talking) Click To Tweet

 

Ona: Men and women would make all the decisions for the colony collectively. Women would be allowed to think. Girls would be taught to read and to write. The schoolhouse must display a map of the world so that we can begin to understand our place in it. A new religion taken from the old, but focused on love, would be created by the women of the colony. Our children would be safe.


 

Mariche: Ona, you’re a dreamer.
Ona: We’re women without a voice. We have nothing to return to. Even the animals are safer in their homes than we women are. All we have are our dreams. So of course we are dreamers.


 

Mariche: What if the men who are in prison are not guilty?

 

'Little is taught by contest or dispute, everything by sympathy and love.' - August (Women Talking) Click To Tweet

 

Salome: We aren’t in charge of whether or not they are punished. We know that we’ve been attacked by men. Not by ghosts or Satan as we were led to believe for so long. We know that we’ve not imagined these attacks. That we were made unconscious with cow tranquilizer. We know that we are bruised, and infected, and pregnant, and terrified, and insane, and some of us are dead. We know that we must protect our children, regardless of who is guilty.


 

Salome: It’s the elder’s quest for power that is responsible.
Ona: Because they needed to have those…
Salome: Those they’d have power over.
Mejal: And those people are us.
Agata: And they have taught the lesson of power to the boys and men of the colony, and the boys and men have been excellent students.


 

Autje: We caught them.
Mariche: Yes, you did.
Autje: Then why are you making it so complicated?
Neitje: This is very, very boring.

 

'We like to put frames around things. Even when they are spilling out the edges.' - Autje (Women Talking) Click To Tweet

 

Agata: None of us have ever asked the men for anything. Not a single thing. Not even for the salt to be passed. Not even for a penny, or a moment alone. Or to take the washing in. Or to open a curtain. Or to go easy on the small yearlings. Or to put your hand on the small of my back while I try again for the twelfth or thirteenth time to push a baby out of my body. Isn’t it interesting that the one and only request we women would have of the men would be for them to leave?


 

Autje: Sometimes I think people laugh as hard as they’d like to cry.

See more Women Talking Quotes


 

Ona: Do you really think it doesn’t matter what you think? How would you feel if in your entire life it never mattered what you thought?
August: But I am not here to think. I’m here to take the minutes of your meeting.
Ona: But if in your entire life you truly felt it didn’t matter what you thought, how would that make you feel? When we’ve liberated ourselves, we will have to ask ourselves who we are.


 

Autje: Why were you forced to leave the colony?
August: My mother questioned things.
Autje: She questioned God?
August: Not God. Power. The rules made in the name of God. And she encouraged others to question things too.


 

August: I want to help. And I don’t know how.


 

Greta: Pros for leaving.
Mejal: We will be gone.
Greta: We will be safe.
Mariche: Maybe not. The first is most definitely a fact, that if we leave we will be gone.


 

Greta: There are no cons of leaving.


 

Greta: Time will heal. Our freedom and safety are the ultimate goals. And it is men who prevent us from achieving those goals.
Mariche: But not all men.
Ona: Perhaps not men, but a way of seeing the world, and us women, which has been allowed to take hold of men’s hearts and minds.


 

Ona: I wouldn’t call the future of our relationship with the boys and men we love “last-minute concerns”.


 

Autje: It was all waiting to happen before it happened. You could look back and follow the breadcrumbs along the path that led to violence. When we looked back, we could see that it had been everywhere, whether it was happening yet or not.


 

Ona: It’s good that you’re here, August. To remind us of what’s possible. Because it’s easy to forget.


 

Ona: [to August] If I were married, I wouldn’t be myself. So the person you love would be gone.


 

Greta: We are wasting our time by passing this burden, this sack of stones, from one to the next, by pushing our pain away. Let’s absorb it ourselves. Let’s inhale it. Let’s digest it. Let’s process it into fuel.


 

Salome: We do not need to be forgiven by the men of God for protecting our children from the depraved actions of vicious men who are often the very same men we’re meant to ask for forgiveness! If God is a loving God then He will forgive us himself. If God is a vengeful God then He has created us in His image. If God is omnipotent, then why has He not protected the women and girls of this colony?


 

Salome: I will destroy any living thing that harms my child. I will tear it limb from limb. I will desecrate its body and I will bury it alive. I will challenge God on the spot to strike me dead if I have sinned by protecting my child from evil, and by destroying that evil that it may not harm another! I will lie, I will hunt, I will kill.


 

Agata: I suggest we think about what is good. “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things, and the peace of God be with you.”


 

Salome: I will become a murderer if I stay.


 

Mariche: We are not all murderers.
Ona: Not yet.


 

Agata: This colony is the only home I’ve ever known. And I don’t want to leave. But by staying, we’ll be inviting harm. We will be in a state of war. We will turn this colony into a battlefield.


 

Ona: We cannot become murderers. And we cannot endure any more violence, which is why we must leave.


 

Ona: We cannot forgive because we are forced to. But, with some distance perhaps I am able to understand how these crimes may have occurred. And with that distance, maybe I am able to pity these men, perhaps forgive them. And even love them. Not fighting. But moving. Always moving. Never fighting. Always moving.


 

Greta: Leaving will give us the more farseeing perspective we need to forgive. Which is to love properly, and keep the peace, according to our faith. Therefore, our leaving wouldn’t be an act of cowardice or abandonment. It wouldn’t be because we were excommunicated or exiled. It would be a supreme act of faith, a step towards love and forgiveness.


 

Greta: Leaving is how we demonstrate our faith. We are leaving because our faith is stronger than the rules. Bigger than our life.


 

Ona: I’m sorry that what I said hurt you.
Mariche: Oh, f*** it off!
Greta: Sit down, Mariche!
Neitje: It’s “f*** off” I think.


 

Mariche: Who are you? Who are any of you to pretend I have had a choice?


 

Agata: What you were required to endure was a…
Greta: Misuse of forgiveness.
Mejal: Is there such a thing? A forgiveness that is not good?
Agata: Perhaps forgiveness can in some instances be confused with permission.


 

Autje: We know why we are leaving. We are leaving because we cannot stay.


 

August: I’m a two-bit schoolteacher, a failed farmer, and above all a believer. And I believe that with guidance, firm love and patience, these boys are capable of relearning their roles as males in the colony.


 

August: I believe in what the great poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought were the cardinal rules of early education. “To work by love and so generate love. To habituate the mind to intellectual accuracy and truth. To excite imaginative power.” He said, “Little is taught by contest or dispute, everything by sympathy and love.”


 

Mariche: [to August] It was a yes or no question. You s**t like any other man, why don’t you talk like one?


 

Autje: They said later, it should have taken longer to pack up a whole life. It was disappointing to realize that everything that ever mattered to you could be gathered up in a few short hours. We would leave only traces of ourselves.


 

August: [to Ona] I wish there was something I could teach you that you didn’t already know.


 

Mariche: We are entitled to three things.
Greta: What are they?
Mariche: We want our children to be safe. We want to be steadfast in our faith. And we want to think.


 

Agata: Make a list, August.
August: A list of what?
Agata: Of good things. Of plans, of memories. Whatever you feel goes into a good list. What we, the women will want there.


 

Agata: I will not be buried in this colony. Get me into a buggy now and let me die on the trail.


 

August: [to Ona] I will always love you.
Agata: She loves you too, August. She loves everyone.


 

August: [to Salome] Don’t come back. Don’t ever come back. Any of you.


 

Autje: Your story will be different from ours.

 


 

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