Northern Exposure Quotes

Maggie: Men can only think of one thing. The joystick. Is it big enough, and where can they put it?

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Maggie: Ok. Sex is fine. Sex is good. Sex is GREAT! Okay, okay, we need men for sex... Do we need so many?

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Chris: Hey Joel, you ever have had a pure moment? A moment of direct insight into the divine nature? Happened to me once in prison. Guess I’d been in about a month. One night I chugalugged six hits of potato home brew while watching a strobe candle. I separated, man. I drifted up, circled the pen twice.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Holling: I'd rather get my brains blown out in the wild than wait in terror at the slaughterhouse.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Chris: Rain usually makes me feel mellow. Curl up in the corner time, slow down, smell the furniture. Today it just makes me feel wet. What is it about possessing things? Why do we feel the need to own what we love, and why do we become jerks when we do? We've all been there--you want something, to possess it. By possessing something you lose it. You finally win the girl of your dreams, the first thing you do is change her. The little things she does with her hair, the way she wears her clothes or the way she chews her gum. Pretty soon what you like, what you changed, what you don't like, blends together like a watercolor in the rain.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Bernard: As you may know, I spent the last three months in Africa. A wondrous, magical place. But as shadows lengthen across the KBHR window, thoughts turn to homecoming. Journey's end. Because in a sense, it's the coming back, the return which gives meaning to the going forth. We really don't know where we've been until we've come back to where we were. Only, where we were may not be as it was because of who we've become. Which is, after all, why we left.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Ned: One person can have a profound effect on another. And two people...well, two people can work miracles. They can change a whole town. They can change the world.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Mary: I just don't know what men want.
Roselyn: Mary, if it's of any consolation, you are not alone. Women had been asking that same question since Eve and Adam.
Mary: Really?
Roselyn: See, men are confused. They are conflicted. They want a woman who is their intellectual equal, but they are afraid of women like that. They want a woman they can dominate, but then they hate her for being weak. It's an ambivalence that goes back to a man's relationship with his mother: source of his life, center of his universe, object of both his fear and his love.
Mary: Uh, I've never though of it like that.
Roselyn: You see, the question is: do you really want a man? For a man to love a woman, this comes naturally because of his love for his mother, but for a woman to love a man , she has to transfer her natural affinity for the female to the male. It's a very difficult process, and in my experience it usually fails. Fortunately, there are alternatives. Just remember one thing. You don't ever need to make yourself into any man's image. People are like shoes, everybody's got a mate somewhere.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Chris: Who is Chris Stevens? Who are any of us? Are we one person fixed at birth or do we grow like a snow ball coming down the mountains side of life? O can we change? Shred our skin? The caterpillar becomes the butterfly leaving the remains of his former self behind. I look at my yearbook photo, class 81, and I wonder who that stranger is. Dam if I know, maybe that's the point, maybe we are not supposed to know, maybe that's what this earthly joyride is all about. Like Robert Frost said "We dance around the ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Ed: Pete…I think you should know that I'm…I'm…I'm…I'm…I'm…
Pete: You're what, Ed?
Ed: Uh, kind of thirsty.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Joel: You're right. You've got yourself a regular looney bin here. It's absolutely incredible that you survived. I guess you're made of something.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Elizabeth Stowe: Poor Jane, always getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Elizabeth Stowe: Jeffy, why the sour puss?
Pearl McCaffrey: Stephi left Jeffy.
Elizabeth Stowe: Stephi left Jeffy?
Eunice McCaffrey: She forgot her mittens.
Elizabeth Stowe: Oh. Remind me to send her a thank-you note.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Joel: I'll be in my office should a patient choose to darken our door.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Chris: They say it's an ill wind that bloweth no man to good. I think our own Dr. Joel Fleischman will attest to that. For those of you who missed it, Maggie scored a one round decision over Dr. Fleischman last night. Right jab to the old honker. Pow! T.K.O. What better sign that the coho winds are once again upon us… My advice this year, don't fight them, embrace them. Know your enemy.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Mike: Sometimes, Maggie, you just have to go for it. Grab for the gusto. Go for the plunge…

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Bernard: Continuous unremitting darkness has been known to send some people into an emotional tailspin, so the management here at KBHR radio suggests locking away the firearms. The desire to stick that 45 between the teeth can get pretty strong at times, so why invite temptation.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Chris: I know it's short notice, but the bride-to-be is pushing for a quickie. Medical emergency. Nope, it's not what you're thinking. Anyway, I know a couple of us have been down the aisle with these people before, maybe this time, they'll make it to the altar. We'll keep our collective fingers crossed.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Ed: Thanks for showing me the outside of your house, Maurice. I especially enjoyed the imaginary flower garden.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Chris: Maurice J. Minnifield, our generous host, friend, and employer. I'm sure I join everyone in saying thank you for these very fine eats and drinks. You are a real American. You're an ex-marine and astronaut, you are America. You're rich, you're rapacious, you're progress without a conscience, paving everything in its path. You're 5% of the earth's population, yet consuming 25% of the earth's natural resources. You pay a lot of taxes, you do a lot of charity work--most of it is tax deductible, but your heart is in the right place. One thing's for certain, you have impeccable taste in the booze.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Joel: You need nine guys on a field to play baseball and ten jews in a room to say kaddish.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Shelly: Take it from me, H. You, me and the rug rat - it's going to be better than Superbowl Sunday.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Chris: What is it about genus arboretum that socks us in the figurative solar plexus? We see a logging truck go cruising down the road, stacked with a bunch of those fresh-cut giants, we feel like we lost a brother. Next thing you know, we're in The Brick, we're flopping money down on the bar. Wood. We're under a roof. Wood. We're walking the floors. Wood. Grabbing a pool cue. That's wood. Our friends in the forest carry a set of luggage from the mythical baggage carousel. Tree of life, tree of knowledge, family tree, Budda's Bodhi tree. Page one of life, in the beginning. Genesis 3: 22. Adam and Eve. They're kicking back in the garden of Eden and boom, they get an eviction notice. Why is that? "Lest they should also take of the tree of life, eat and live forever." A definitive Yahweh no-no. Be good to yourself Cicely, go out and plant a wet one on a tree.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Joel: Sometimes the mind, for reasons we don't necessarily understand, just decides to go to the store for a quart of milk.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Joel: Excuse me, would you ladies mind postponing your trenchant literary critique so we can continue with our little medical practice here?

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Chris: You know what you are Earl? You're a little, tiny, busy ant. You too, Mike. Both you guys, with your mortgages and your term life insurance and your Weber kettles. Ant. Ant. All of you, you're all a bunch of little, busy, blind ants. All you all. Saving up for your rainy days. Scratching up your acorns for the winter. You look at me and you think, "What a piece of pathetic trash out there in that leaky trailer." No spoon, no fork, no prospects. But, you know why? Cause I'm a grasshopper. Ant. Grasshopper. Ant. Grasshopper. Ant. Grasshopper. Ant. Grasshopper. Ant!

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Maurice: [Maurice catches Ed talking to his statue] Look, Ed. If you've got something to say, you say it to me. You got that?
Ed: Okay, Maurice. But, uh -
Maurice: But what?
Ed: Well, it's just that he's a little easier to talk to.
Maurice: The statue?
Ed: Well, he doesn't throw my thoughts off like you do sometimes.
Maurice: I don't throw your thoughts off, son! What are you talking about?
Ed: Well, kind of like now, Maurice.
Maurice: I'm not in the business of throwing people's thoughts off! Is that clear?

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Joel: Oh God. Oh my God. I'm sitting here eating seeds and having a serious conversation about winter clothing. First my wallet and now this. What is happening?

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Kevin: The Homecoming queen is supposed to be a babe.

TV Show: Northern Exposure
Marilyn: The Eagle wasn't always the Eagle. The Eagle, before he became the Eagle, was Yucatangee, the Talker. Yucatangee talked and talked. It talked so much it heard only itself. Not the river, not the wind, not even the Wolf. The Raven came and said "The Wolf is hungry. If you stop talking, you'll hear him. The wind too. And when you hear the wind, you'll fly." So he stopped talking. And became its nature, the Eagle. The Eagle soared, and its flight said all it needed to say

TV Show: Northern Exposure