Best / worst dialog?

Some of my favorite lines are from a psychotic and suicidal Todd in "The Thin White Line".

"I've been wandering a vast, arid desert between Heaven and Hell and I've got a gigantic thirst!"

"I feel cold. Its like the Angel of Death just flew between me and the life-giving sun!"

"In this night I lived a lifetime. A hundred lifetimes. I saw God and the Devil locked in mortal combat; infinitely vivid, incredibly detailed. I lived my whole life back to the very moment of my birth. For me only one great adventure remains."

I also like Buzzes' two speeches from "Ever Ride the Waves in Oklahoma?"; the first when he is angry about the surfer's lifestyle of not working and then later on when he relents.

"Hey King- ever ride the waves in Oklahoma? They've got surfers in Oklahoma, too, getting tanned under pool room lights like they got guys that hang around the drugstores in Brooklyn, and guys that watch the trucks unload in Kansas City, and guys that hide all day in downtown movie houses. Surfers! Just like the bums on skid row. All surfers! Except they lie on asphalt instead of beach!"

"Everybody's got their own style, you know...everybody makes his own moves when he can and how he can. The guys that ride the waves in Oklahoma, the ones that watch the trucks unload in Kansas City or the guys on skid row- even that far down. Once you say "they're people", you have to say maybe they're getting ready to make their moves in their own ways. But if they make it, when they make it, how they make it, win or lose...that's between a man and himself. Something like that. That's what you made me understand."

Piney

Don't mean to dent your thought bubble, but His pick up lines there do make sense, and I am not even good at math, but I can decipher the metaphors.

A little beatnik, jazz, and math mixed in to a poetic attempt at mating.

Stirling Silliphant didn't just have ideas he had some words man.

Ephemeron.

Here's one for the head scratching department, from Tod's ending soliloquy of "Go Read the River":

Whoever fights the future has a mortal enemy, a faceless enemy, because the future has no being of its own. It steals its being from each man and once it's tricked him of his secrets it appears outside him. A predator he must meet. But it can be met and it can be vanquished if only he will reach out for it with open arms and a hungry heart.

Can't remember which episode.
Tod says to Buz "when I burn a bridge even the river disappears."

Sterling Silliphant the writer was trying to be ultraliterate even though that didn't correspond to reality. So the dialogue is usually interesting and original, but unrealistic. In general it has lots of these head scratchers, and the plots often make no sense. Still it's a great show...I try to overlook those issues.

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