A Scanner Darkly Quotes

Freck: What do you think about the New Path?
Barris: While it doesn't matter what I think, I kinda have to tip my hat to any entity that can bring so much integrity to evil. I mean, imagine this: a seemingly voluntary, privatized gulag which has managed to eliminate the meddling middlemen of public accountability and free will and wrap it up in a little bow

and give it to the public like a gift. I mean, come on this is...
[he makes exploding sounds and gestures]
Barris: ... this is awe-inspiring stuff.
Freck: I heard you have to go cold turkey.
Barris: Cold turkey doesn't even apply to Substance D. Unlike the legacy of inherited predisposition to addictive behaviors or

substances, this needs no genetic assistance. There's no weekend warriors on the D. You're either on it... or you haven't tried it.
Freck: Well, I like it.
Barris: Yeah. How many caps do you take per day?
Freck: Hmmm... very difficult to determine. But not that many.
Barris: Well, like the old-school

pharmacopoeia, a tolerance develops, you know. These visions of bugs, they're just garden-variety psychosis, but a clear indication that you've hurdled over the initial fun and euphoric phase and passed on... to the next phase. News from the guinea pig grapevine suggests that whatever it is, we won't know until it's way too late, you see? You see that we're all canaries in the coal mine on this

one?
Freck: Mm. I do think I have another source. That Donna chick.
Barris: Bob's girl?
Freck: Yeah.
Barris: Yeah, "his girl," although I know for a fact he never gets in her pants.
Freck: Really?
Barris: Yeah.
Freck: But he...

talks like he does.
Barris: Oh, yeah. That's Bob Arctor. He talks like he does many things. It's not the same, my friend, it's not the same thing. Donna has an aversion to bodily contact. I mean, junkies lose their interest in sex, you realize, due to organs swelling up from vasoconstriction. And I have observed in her an inordinate failure of sexual arousal not just toward

Bob Arctor, but to... other males as well.
Freck: I can't believe she doesn't put out.
Barris: Well, she would... if she were handled right. For instance, I could show you how to sleep with her for less than three dollars.
Freck: I don't wanna sleep with her. I wanna buy from her.
Barris: Donna does

coke, all right?
Freck: Three dollars doesn't get you a line of coke.
Barris: Ah-ah. That's where you're wrong, pal.