Big Fish Monologues

A frustrated son tries to determine the fact from fiction in his dying father's life.

They say when you meet the love of your life, time stops, and that's true. What they don't tell you is that when it starts again, it moves extra fast to catch up.

There's a time when a man needs to fight, and a time when he needs to accept that his destiny is lost... the ship has sailed and only a fool would continue. Truth is... I've always been a fool.

Sometimes, the only way to catch an uncatchable woman is to offer her a wedding ring.

Most men, they'll tell you a story straight through. It won't be complicated, but it won't be interesting either.

I don't know if you're aware of this, Josephine, but African parrots, in their native home of the Congo, they speak only French.

You're lucky to get four words out of them in English, but if you were to walk through the jungle, you'd hear them speaking the most elaborate French. Those parrots talk about everything. Politics, movies, fashion. Everything but religion.

It's rude to talk about religion. You never know who you're gonna offend.

I've been nothin' but myself since the day I was born, and if you can't see that it's your failin', not mine.

I don't usually remember, unless they're especially portentous. Do you know what that word means?

Means when you dream about something that's gonna happen. Like one night, I had a dream where this crow came and said, "Your aunt is gonna die." I was so scared I woke up my parents, but they said it was just a dream and to get back to bed. But the next morning my Aunt Stacy was dead.

Terrible for her, but think about me, young boy with that kind of power. Wasn't three weeks later when the crow came back to me in a dream and said, "Your daddy's gonna die." I didn't know what to do. I finally told my father, but he said, "Oh, not to worry," but I could see he was rattled. The next morning, he wasn't himself. Kept looking around, waiting for something to drop on his head. Because the crow didn't say how it was gonna happen, just those words: "Your daddy's gonna die." Well, he left home early and was gone a long time. When he finally came back, he looked terrible, like he was waiting for the ax to fall all day. He said to my mother, "I've just had the worst day of my life." "You think you've had a bad day," she said. "This morning, the milkman just dropped dead on the porch." Because see, my mother was banging the milkman.

It's rude to talk about religion, you never know who you're gonna offend.

Do I? I saw an iceberg once. They were hauling it down to Texas for drinking water. They didn't count on there being an elephant frozen inside. The wooly kind. A mammoth.

Well you shouldn't have started with a question, because most people want to answer questions. You should've started with "the thing about icebergs is."

Truth is, I've always been thirsty.

A man sees things differently at different times in his life. This town didn't seem the same now that he was older. A new road had brought the outside world to Spectre, and with it, banks, liens and debt. Almost everywhere you looked, people were bankrupt.

Fate has a cruel way of circling around on you. After all this work to leave Ashton the girl I love was now engaged to one of its biggest jerks. There's a time when a man needs to fight and a time when he needs to accept that his destiny's lost; the ship has sailed, and that only a fool will continue. Truth is, I've always been a fool.

I was never much for being at home, Will. It's too confining. And this, here - being stuck in bed. Dying is the worst thing that ever happened to me.