And Then She Said . . .

I like dialogue. This will come as no surprise to anyone who’s read my stuff, but what I really love is reading great dialogue by other people, like River Song’s line from Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who episode, “Let’s Kill Hitler.” Confronted by of Nazi soldiers in the streets of Berlin while holding what I think is an automatic rifle (I’m lousy with guns), River says:

I was on my way to this gay Gypsy bar mitzvah for the disabled when I suddenly thought “Gosh, the Third Reich’s a bit rubbish. I think I’ll kill the Fuehrer.

That’s the kind of Up Yours dialogue that makes people cheer. But there are lines that are a lot subtler, that make the viewer connect the dots, that can be more devastating. This is one of my favorites from the Sports Night episode “Sally” by Aaron Sorkin and the other people on his writing staff:

Gordon, you’re wearing my shirt.

Yeah, if you’ve never seen the series, it doesn’t have the oomph of River Song, but I remember watching that scene for the first time, my mouth dropping open at the shock and brilliance of it, and thinking, “Why can’t I write like that?”

Which goes back to context. Most great lines are great because they’re in the mouths of characters who are characterized by them, who are affected by them, because we care about those characters and that situation so much. River saying her line to one Nazi in the bar does not have the same impact as River standing in a street surrounded by Nazis pointing guns at her. The first situation is River being a smart ass. The second situation is River being a smart ass insanely gutsy freedom fighter with boundary issues. Context is everything.

That may be why so many favorite “lines” are actually exchanges. KM Fawcett posted this exchange in the comments from the last Doctor Who discussion (this is Moffat again, in “The Impossible Astronaut” after River slaps the Doctor):

Doctor: “I’m assuming that’s for something I haven’t done yet?”

River: “Yes, it is.”

Doctor: “Good, looking forward to it.”

That’s good dialogue for a lot of reasons: it’s entirely in character for both of them, it plays with time travel, and it summarizes their relationship with a lot of sexual tension undertones without being about sex or flirting. Moffat is a master of that rapid fire banter, but I can tell you that banter is easy compared to the Great One Line because you can set up your own tension between not just the characters but the sentences. Your characters can riff off each other, turn tables on each other, each exchange making the previous dialogue better in retrospect. This is River and the Doctor again in “The Wedding of River Song” by Moffat:

River: Cleopatra was a real pushover.

The Doctor: I always thought so.

River: She mentioned you.

The Doctor: What did she say?

River: “Put down that gun.”

So banter is (comparatively) easy, but the single line stopper is hard. Which may be why my favorite line of dialogue of all time is from a book about a boy who’s just trying to do the right thing by his society and his best friend and finds them in direct conflict with each other. He’s too young to work out the distinction, but he makes his decision anyway, and delivers it in seven words that sum up everything he is and everything his story is:

All right then, I’ll go to hell.

Best line ever.

Your turn. Favorite lines of dialogue, please. with source, writer, and speaker if you can.