"The Shawshank Redemption": quotes from the film, the difference between the film and the book

Phrases from the movie "The Shawshank Redemption"

That's the beauty of music - it can't be confiscated.

No fairy tales are told in prison. Prison doesn't look like a fairy tale at all.

Do you want to know if I repent? Not a day goes by that I don't regret it. Not because I'm here and not because I have to. I remember my past self, when I was a stupid boy who committed a terrible crime. I want to talk to him, explain what’s what, I want to straighten his brains out, but I can’t. This guy is long gone, only this old man is left, and I have to live with it.

If you've come this far, can you go even further?

In prison a person can do whatever he wants. As long as his mind is occupied.

It all comes down to a very simple choice: get busy living or get busy dying.

The world is moving further and further and for some reason it has begun to hurry.

All it takes is patience, time and pressure.

There is something inside you that cannot be touched, it is only yours. This is hope.

Do you know what Mexicans say about the Pacific Ocean? They say he has no memory.

Sometimes time can cut like a sharp razor.

My wife said that they couldn’t understand me, that I was like a closed book. She constantly complained about it. She was beautiful. God, I loved her. I just didn't know how to show it. And he killed her, Red. I didn't shoot, but I drove her away, and she died because of me. Because of who I am...

We're all innocent here, don't you know?

Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a person crazy.

We sat and drank beer, the sun warmed our shoulders, it felt like we were free people.

If I were you, I would grow eyes on the back of my head.

Hope is a good thing, maybe even the best thing, and good things don't die.

Failure - it seems to fly around, and in the end, it has to land on someone.

They become deaf as soon as money comes up.

I still don’t know what these two Italian women were singing about, and I don’t want to know. There are some things that are better to remain silent about. I like to think that they were singing about something so beautiful that it cannot be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache. I tell you, these voices hovered where no one dares to go in their dreams. It was as if some beautiful bird flew into our cage and made these walls disappear. And for a moment, every inhabitant of Shawshank felt like a free person.

All that remains is the hellish cold and there is time ahead to think about it.

Move away! An accident happens to him!

The first night is the hardest without any doubt. It's like you're reborn with your skin burned and half-blind from all those disinfectants. And when you are thrown into a cell, when the bolts close with a roar, only then do you realize that all this is true. The past life disappears in the blink of an eye.

At first you hate these walls, then you get used to them, and when you sit here long enough, it turns out that you depend on them.

Fear makes you a prisoner. Hope gives you freedom.

You are sent here for life, and it is your life that is taken away.

Pacific Ocean. I would be scared. He is so big.

Every person has a moment when they break down.

I want to go where it’s warm and there’s no memory.

I've had long nights in prison. In complete darkness, alone with my thoughts.

There are rumors that you are arrogant. Do you think your shit smells better than others?

I hope I get across the border, I hope I see my friend and shake his hand, I hope the Pacific Ocean is as blue as I dreamed it is, I hope...

Blacks, whites, yellows and redskins - in prison all this is unimportant, that’s where universal equality comes.

Chess is the game of kings. Civilized and strategic, and absolutely unstoppable.

I was an honest man. It was enough for me to go to prison for me to become a criminal.

I believe in two things: discipline and the Bible. Here you will get both. Commit your souls to the Lord, because your asses belong to me.

I'm so excited that I can't sit still and my thoughts can't stay in my head. I think only a free person can feel this way. A free man at the beginning of a long journey, the end of which is unclear.

Phrases and quotes from the movie "The Shawshank Redemption". A cult American drama film filmed in 1994, directed by Frank Darabont. The film is based on Stephen King's story "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption." The film takes 1st place in the list of “250 best films according to visitors to the KinoPoisk website” and “250 best films according to IMDb”

First, a few words about King's style

King without the horror genre is not King. This is what many said until Road Work, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, The Corpse, etc. were published. But even here, the master of horror is not particularly brilliant with his statements. Yes, he is a master at creating thoughtful images, but the endings of his works are often lame. And although in the work we are discussing there is more than everything in order with the ending (it is not often that King comes across things in which the ending turns out to be in a rosy light), “The Shawshank Redemption” does not shine with unique quotes. The plot is excellent. The dialogues are lively, reasoning and other thoughts are presented masterfully. But for some reason there are no individual phrases that sink into the soul. What did Frank Darabont do about it?

Frank Darabont and his ability to “bring charm”

Take even the Green Mile. The story itself would not have made such a big splash if it weren’t for Darabont’s skill. The ability to write a fictional script based on a work, separating the wheat from the chaff, leaving the main core intact, and then decorating it with your own vivid quotes, twists and events, and also directing a film based on it with your own hands, is not given to every director. Frank is one of those guys. That’s why all the most striking quotes in the film belong to him. And although King presented everything that was necessary in his work, it was Darabont who was able to put the most basic thoughts into short quotes in The Shawshank Redemption.

A few words about the plot

If few people read the story, then everyone, of course, watched the film. For those who have been doing this for a long time, let us remind you that the main plot in The Shawshank Redemption, the 1994 film, revolves around successful banker Andy Dufresne, who was sent to Shawshank prison for no reason. He did not kill his wife and lover, but was forced to serve in this prison for almost 20 years (from 1947 to 1966) until he escaped from it, digging a hole in the wall with a geological hammer and crawling through about half a kilometer of a narrow sewer pipe. Andy covered his secret passage with a large poster of another currently famous film actress. The first was Rita Hayworth, hence the name of the book version. After that, many actresses took turns replacing her, including Marilyn Monroe.

Inconsistencies between the film and the book version

The most important inconsistency is Andy's prison term. Having been imprisoned in 1947 (as in the book), in the film he escapes already in 1966, having served 19 years. In King's story, it took Andy much longer to dig the tunnel. In the story, King writes:

...When Andy went to Shawshank in 1948, he was 30 years old. He was a short, charming man with sandy hair and small narrow palms...

Actor Tim Robbins, who played Andy Dufresne, was 2 meters tall. And in the story, his hero managed to escape only in 1975, when he was already 58, having been in Shawshank for 28 years.

During Andy's time in prison, several prison governors changed. Other personnel also changed. In particular, the chief of security, Byron Hadley (the most evil warden, played by Clancy Brown in the film), according to the book, resigned from prison back in 1957. Here are excerpts from the story:

... George Dunay left the stage to the noise of newspapermen shouting: “scandal!”, “corruption!”, “emergency!” Stamos took over, and for the next six years Schenk looked like hell. The beds in the infirmary and the solitary convicts in the punishment cell were never empty.

Stamos left in 1959. /… / Byron Headley left two years earlier. The bastard had a heart attack and resigned, to the great joy of all Schenk. At the beginning of 1959, the prison had a new commandant, a new assistant commandant and a new head of security. /… / …until that winter of 1963 came. By that time we had a new commandant, Samuel Norton...

As we see, Norton’s turn came only in 1962 or 1963. In the film, he was the warden of the prison all the time and Captain Hadley was always with him.

Inconsistencies can also include:

1. Hadley did not kill the fat man that first night. In the book, King did not allow such arbitrariness.
2. Nobody collected stones for Andy's chess. There is no talk of any chess in the story at all. Andy himself collected the pebbles in the prison yard (or in the cell wall?), after which he polished them and gave them to his friends, in particular, Red.
3. At King's, Andy and Red never played checkers.
4. During his first meeting with Andy, Norton held Andy's Bible in his hands without opening it, and returned it to Dufresne's hands with the words: “Read the Bible. There is salvation in it.” And if I opened it, I would definitely find a hammer in it. Before escaping, Andy leaves a Bible with a hammer stencil in Norton's safe, writing on the first page: "You were right, salvation was in the Bible." It was all Darabont's idea. There is not a word about this in the story.
5. Old Librarian Brooks was released in 1952. In the film he hanged himself, but in the book he simply died of loneliness in a nursing home the following year after his release. Therefore, Red, after being amnestied, could not live in the room in which Brooks had previously lived.
6. The bird in the story was not with Brooks but with another prisoner, Sherwood Bolton, and it was a dove, not a crow, which lived with him from 1945 to 1953. When Bolton was pardoned, he released it out the window. The pigeon was later found dead of starvation, as it was allegedly not adapted to exist in the normal world. By this, King drew an analogy with prisoners who were accustomed to living in prison for many years and were weaning themselves from life in the wild.
7. In the book, Dufresne did not teach Tomy William, who revealed the truth about his wife's murder.
8. In Tomy's story, William was not killed, but simply transferred to a prison with less strict conditions of imprisonment, something like our “settlement colony,” and this was done to silence him so that he would refuse to testify if a hearing on the retrial of Dufresne’s case took place.
9. According to the book, Andrew didn't shine his boss's shoes. Didn't steal his clothes. Didn’t steal money from him and didn’t rat anyone out to the police or newspapermen. He just ran away. And he made his fortune from his initial savings that he and his wife had - from 14 thousand bucks. He was good at manipulating the securities market, and his entire fortune was recorded in another name. A good friend in the wild helped him with this. In the film, he took all the money from the warden, since everything was also carried out through a figurehead, allegedly a business colleague of Norton. After escaping, he withdrew all the money from Norton’s company account under the guise of this same partner, Randal Stevenson. In the book, after his escape, he was supposed to become Peter Stevens. Darabont only slightly retained his last name.
10. In King's story, Andy never contacted Red's "business rivals" in prison to give him a harmonica. There was no talk of any harmonica or playing it.
11. The warden shot himself only in the film. There was nothing like that in the book, since the fact that Andy ratted him out to the newspapers was Darabont's invention.

An interesting fact is that in the book, an Indian was sitting in the same cell with Andy for some time, in 1959, which is why he could not continue his work on making a hole under the poster. The Indian subsequently said the following about Andy himself and his camera:

… - I liked him. Never makes fun. But he didn't want me to live there. This is understandable. Terrible drafts in the cell. It's cold all the time. He doesn't allow anyone to touch his things. I left. Nice guy, doesn't mock, doesn't make fun of him. But the drafts are terrible...

From which we can conclude that even then the hole was made through, judging by the same drafts and cold in the chamber. Why then did Dufresne wait until 1975? It's a mystery. Red had some thoughts on this matter, but overall it remained unknown. Maybe it took much more time to widen the hole, or maybe he couldn’t decide on a half-kilometer “forced march” along a narrow sewer pipe?..