Breaking Bad
from the TV series created by Vince Gilligan
Group Leader (Jere Burns): Jesse, last time you seemed pretty down about your job at the Laundromat. Let me ask you something. If you had the chance to do anything you wanted, what would you do?
Jesse (Aaron Paul): Make more green, man, a lot more.
Group Leader: Forget about money. Assume you have all you want.
Jesse: I don't know. I guess I would make something.
Group Leader: Like what?
Jesse: Not that it even matters, but... work with my hands, I guess. Building things, like... carpentry or brick laying or something? I took this vo-tech class in high school, wood working. I took a lot of vo-tech classe because it was just a big jerk-off, but this one time I had this teacher name of... Mr. Pike. I guess he was, like, a Marine or something before he got old. He was hard of hearing. My project for his class was to make this wooden box, you know, like a small... just like a... like a box, you know, to put stuff in. So I wanted to get the thing done just as fast as possible. I figured I could cut classes for the rest of the semester, and he couldn't flunk me as long as I, you know, made the thing. So I finished it in a couple days. It looked pretty lame, but it worked, you know, for putting stuff in or whatnot. So when I showed it to Mr. Pike for my grade, he looked at it and said, "Is that the best you can do?"
At first I thought to myself, "Hell, yeah, bitch. Now give me a D and shut up so I can go blaze one with my boys." I don't know. Maybe it was the way he said it, but... it was, like... He wasn't exactly saying it sucked. He was just asking me honestly, "Is that all you got?" And for some reason I thought to myself, "Yeah, man, I can do better", so I started from scratch. I made another, then another, and by the end of the semester, by, like, box number five, I had built this thing. You should've seen it. It was insane. I built it out of Peruvian Walnut with inlaid Zebrawood. It was fitted with pegs, no screws. I sanded it for days until it was smooth as glass. Then I rubbed all the wood with tung oil so it was... rich and dark. It even smelled good. You know, you put your nose in it and breathed in, it was... It was perfect.
Group Leader: What happened to the box?
Jesse: I gave it to my mom.
Group Leader: Nice. You know what I'm going to say, don't you? It's never too late. They have art co-ops that offer classes, adult extension program at the university.
Jesse: You know, I didn't give the box to my mom. I traded it for an ounce of weed.
Walter: I've done a terrible thing, but I did it for a good reason. I did it for us. That...is college tuition for Walter Jr. and Holly, 18 years down the road. Then it's health insurance for you and the kids, for Junior's physical therapy, his SAT tutor. It's money for groceries and gas, for birthdays and graduation parties. That money is for this roof over your head, the mortgage that you are not going to be able to afford on a part-time bookkeeper's salary when I'm gone.
Skyler: Walt, I...
Walter: Please. Please. This money... I didn't steal it. It doesn't belong to anyone else. I earned it. The things I've...done to earn it... The... the... things I've had to do, I've got to live with them. Skyler, all that I've done, all the sacrifices that I have... made for this family, all of that will be for nothing if you don't accept what I've earned. Please. ... I'll be here when you get home from work. You can give me your answer then.
Walter: My father died when I was 6. You knew that, right? Yeah. He had Huntington's Disease. It's-- destroys portions of the brain, affects muscle control, leads to dementia. It's just a nasty disease. It's genetic. It terrified my mother that I might have it, so they ran tests on me when I was a kid, but I came up clean. My father fell very ill when I was 4 or 5. He spent a lot of time in the hospital. My-- My mother would tell me so many stories about my father. She would talk about him all the time. I knew about his personality, how he treated people. I even knew how he liked his steaks cooked-- medium rare. Just like you. I knew things about my father. I had a lot of information. It's because people would tell me these things. They would paint this picture of my father for me, and I always pretended that was who I saw, too, who I remembered, but it was a lie. In truth, I only have one real, actual memory of my father. It must've been right before he died. My mother would take me to the hospital to visit him, and I remember the smell in there, the chemicals. It was as if they use up every single cleaning product they could find in a 50-mile radius... like they didn't want you smelling the sick people. Oh, there was this stench of Lysol and bleach. You could just feel it coating your lungs. Anyway, there, lying on the bed, is my father. He's all-- He's all twisted up. And my mom, she puts me on her lap. She's sitting on the bed next to him so I can get a good look at him... but really he just scares me... and he's looking right at me... but I can't even be sure that he knows who I am. And your grandmother is talking, trying to be cheerful, you know, as she does, but the only thing I could remember is him breathing. Oh, th-- this-- this rattling sound, like if you were shaking an empty spray-paint can. Like there was nothing in him. Anyway... that is the only real memory that I have of my father. I don't want you to think of me the way I was last night. I don't want that to be the memory you have of me when I'm gone.