Martin Hart: Uh… 3 months we’ve been together; I get nothing from you. Today, what we’re into now, do me a courtesy, okay? I’m not trying to convert you.
Rustin Cohle: Look, I consider myself a realist, all right, but in philosophical terms, I’m what’s called a pessimist.
Martin Hart: Um, okay. What’s that mean?
Rustin Cohle: Means I’m bad at parties.
Martin Hart: Heh. Let me tell you. You ain’t great outside of parties either.
Rustin Cohle: I think human consciousness was a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law.
Martin Hart: Huh. That sounds god-fucking-awful, Rust.
Rustin Cohle: We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, this accretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody.
Martin Hart: I wouldn’t go around spouting that shit, I was you. People around here don’t think that way. I don’t think that way.
Rustin Cohle: I think the honorable thing for species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.
Martin Hart: So what’s the point of getting out of bed in the morning?
Rustin Cohle: I tell myself I bear witness, but the real answer is that it’s obviously my programming, and I lack the constitution for suicide.
Martin Hart: My luck, I picked today to get to know you. 3 months, I don’t hear a word from you, and…
Rustin Cohle: You asked.
Martin Hart: Yeah. And now I’m begging you to shut the fuck up.

True Detective S01E01

Rustin Cohle: I can be hard to live with. You know, I… I don’t mean to, but I can be critical. And Sometimes I think I’m just not good for people. You know, that it’s not good for them to be around me. You know, I… I wear them down. You know, they… They get unhappy.
Maynard Gilbough: Hmm. Yeah, I think the job does that to a lot of guys. Changes you. Some guys just notice, that’s all.
Rustin Cohle: Well, I can’t say the job made me this way. More like me being this way made me right for the job. I used to think about it more, but, you know, you reach a certain age, you know who you are. Now I live in a little room out in the country, behind a bar. Work four nights a week. In between, I drink. And there aint nobody there to stop me. I know who I am. After all these years, there’s a… There’s a victory in that.

***

Rustin Cohle: You got kids? Mmm. I think of the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of non-existence into this meat. And to force a life into this thresher. And as for my daughter, she, uh… She spared me the sin of being a father.

True Detective S01E02

Rustin Cohle: What do you think the average IQ of this group is, huh?
Martin Hart: Can you see Texas up there on your high horse? What do you know about these people?
Rustin Cohle: Just observation and deduction. I see a propensity for obesity, poverty, a yen for fairy tales. Folks putting what few bucks they do have into little wicker baskets being passed around. I think it’s safe to say that nobody here’s gonna be splitting the atom, Marty.
Martin Hart: You see that? Your fucking attitude. Not everybody wants to sit alone in an empty room beating off to murder manuals. Some folks enjoy community, a common good.
Rustin Cohle: Yeah, but if the common good’s got to make up fairy tales, then it’s not good for anybody.
Martin Hart: I mean, can you imagine if people didn’t believe? What things they’d get up to?
Rustin Cohle: The exact same thing they do now, just out in the open.
Martin Hart: Bullshit. It’d be a fucking freak show of murder and debauchery, and you know it.
Rustin Cohle: If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then, brother, that person is a piece of shit. And I’d like to get as many of them out in the open as possible.
Martin Hart: I guess your judgement is infallible, piece-of-shit-wise. You think that notebook is a stone tablet?
Rustin Cohle: What’s it say about life? Hmm? you got to get together, tell yourselves stories that violate every law of the universe, just to get through the goddamn day? No. What’s that say about your reality, Marty?
Martin Hart: When you get to talking like this, you sound panicked.

***

Thomas Papania: You figure it’s all a scam, huh? All them folks.
Rustin Cohle: Mmm, hmm.
Thomas Papania: They’re just wrong?
Rustin Cohle: Oh, yeah. Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey, ‘He said for you to give your fucking share.’ People are so goddamn frail, they’d rather put a coin in a wishing well than buy dinner.

***

Rustin Cohle: Transference of fear and self-loathing to an authoritarian vessel. It’s catharsis. He absorbs their dread with his narrative. Because of this, he’s effective in proportion to the amount of certainty he can project. Certain linguistic anthropologists think that religion is a language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain, dulls critical thinking.
Martin Hart: Well, I don’t use $10 words as much as you, but for a guy who sees no point in existence, you sure fret about it an awful lot. And you still sound panicked.
Rustin Cohle: At least I’m not racing to a red light.

***

Rustin Cohle: See, we all got what I call a life trap. A gene-deep certainty that things will be different. That you’ll move to another city and meet the people that’ll be the friends for the rest of your life, that you’ll fall in love and be fulfilled. Fucking fulfillment. And closure. Whatever the fuck those two… Fucking empty jars to hold this shit storm. Nothing’s ever fulfilled. Not until the very end. And closure. No. No, no. Nothing is ever over.

***

Rustin Cohle: People… I’ve seen the finale of thousands of lives, man. Young, old. Each one so sure of their realness, that their sensory experience constituted a unique individual, with purpose, meaning. So certain that they were more than a biological puppet. Well, yeah, the truth wills out, and everybody sees once the strings are cut, all fall down…. Each still body so certain that they were more than the sum of their urges. All the useless spinning. Tired mind, collision, desire, and ignorance…. This. This is what I’m talking about. This is what I mean when I’m talking about time, death, and futility. There are broader ideas at work. Mainly, what is owed between us, as a society, for our mutual illusions. Fourteen straight hours of staring at DBs, these are the things you think of. You ever done that? You look in their eyes, even in a picture. Doesn’t matter if they’re dead or alive, you can still read them. And you know what you see? They welcomed it. Hmm. Not at first, but right there in the last instant, it’s an unmistakable relief. See, ’cause they were afraid and now they saw for the very first time how easy it was to just let go. And they saw… in that last nanosecond, they saw what they were. That you, yourself, this whole big drama, it was never anything but a jerry-rig of presumption and dumb will. And you could just let go. Finally know that you didn’t have to hold on so tight. To realize that in all your life, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain, it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room. A dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams, there’s a monster at the end of it.

True Detective S01E03

Rustin Cohle: There was a moment… I know when I was under in the dark that something… Whatever I had been reduced to, not even consciousness, it was a vague awareness in the dark… And I could… I could feel my definitions fading. And beneath that darkness, there was another kind, it was deeper, warm. Like a substance. I could feel, man. And I knew… I knew my daughter waited for me there. So clear… I could feel her. I could feel them. I could feel a piece of my pop, too. It was like I was a part of everything that I ever loved. And we were all, the three of us, just fading out. And all I had to do was let go. And I did. I said, ‘Darkness, yeah!’ And I disappeared. But I could still feel her love there. Even more than before. Nothing… Nothing but that love. And then I woke up.
Martin Hart: Hey, uh… Didn’t, uh… Didn’t you tell me one time, at dinner, once, maybe, about… You used to… You used to make up stories about the stars?
Rustin Cohle: Yeah, I was in Alaska, under the night skies.
Martin Hart: Yeah. You used to lay there and look up. Yeah. At the stars.
Rustin Cohle: You remember, I never watched a TV till I was 17, so there wasn’t much to fucking do out there, besides walk around, explore.
Martin Hart: And… And then look up at the stars and make up stories. Like what?
Rustin Cohle: I’ll tell you, Marty, I’ve been up in that room, looking out those windows every night here. Just thinking it’s just one story. The oldest.
Martin Hart: What’s that?
Rustin Cohle: Light versus dark.
Martin Hart: Well, I know we ain’t in Alaska, but it appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.
Rustin Cohle: Yeah. You’re right about that…. You’re looking at it wrong, at the sky.
Martin Hart: How’s that?
Rustin Cohle: Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.
wasted: And now I’m begging you to shut the fuck up.

True Detective S01E08