Maj. Horace Holly Quotes in She (1965)

Maj. Horace Holly: War seems to have shot away all our roots.

Maj. Horace Holly: Will you tell me something? This woman Ayesha, why do you all do her bidding without question?

Billali: It has always been so.

Maj. Horace Holly: Yes, but why? She's only a woman and alone. You are men and many.

Billali: And like all men we are born, we live a span and we die. But she has been here forever. She is like the mountains, like the desert. Changeless, ageless, deathless.

Maj. Horace Holly: That I cannot believe. In your fear, you have accepted the impossible as truth. No one lives forever. And no one was born to be the vassal of another. You know and feel this too, I've seen it in your eyes. Your body does her bidding but your spirit cries out to be free. Is that not true?

Billali: Each one of us has his own destiny to fulfill.

Maj. Horace Holly: And yours, I suppose, is to fill the next alcove. I can't believe you're such a fool, Bellali.

Billali: No, Mr Holly. I am not such a fool.

Maj. Horace Holly: I suppose there's a time in everyone's life when the idea of immortality seems very desirable. But now at my age I'd have to give it a great deal of thought.

Leo Vincey: What's age got to do with it? You'd stay as you are.

Maj. Horace Holly: That's not what I meant, Leo. What one would accept eagerly at your age doesn't necessarily have the same appeal at mine. It's the age of the mind that's important, not the body. You see, you're young. Still on the threshold of life. The joy of living is not to be denied, but to know that it'll be there for all time, without change. Life at a standstill. It's not quite the same thing.

Maj. Horace Holly: [about the flame] It'll come back some day.

Leo Vincey: When, Holly, when?

Maj. Horace Holly: That I can't tell you, Leo. But you wanted immortality.

Leo Vincey: When it comes back, it will find me waiting.

Leo Vincey: Was that barbaric execution necessary?

Ayesha: It was necessary!

Maj. Horace Holly: In God's name, why?

Ayesha: As a demonstration of my absolute power! How else could I hold my soldiers and these pathetic creatures as my subjects? How else but by instilling fear and terror into their very souls.

Maj. Horace Holly: But nothing is gained by fear and terror.

Ayesha: Is your world so much better? Your world where men kill each other in their millions in the name of freedom? Your world that has not long to live. A few decades only before it destroys itself. Then, what will be left?

Maj. Horace Holly: All my life I've dreamed of finding a city such as this. But now that I have, I'd like to see it destroyed and all it stands for.

Maj. Horace Holly: It's the age of the mind that's important, not the body.