30 Best Three Thousand Years of Longing Quotes

Alithea: Love is a gift. It's a gift of oneself given freely. It's not something one can ever ask for.

Alithea: Do you know the answer to her question?
Genie: What women most desire?
Alithea: Yeah.
Genie: Do you not know? If you don't know, I cannot tell you.
Alithea: Well, surely we don't all want the same thing.
Genie: Madam, your yearnings are not at all clear to me.

Genie: We exist only if we are REAL to others

Genie: So, what would you wish for? What is your heart's desire?
Alithea: Now, let's not get ahead of ourselves. I need to take this slow.
Genie: I have all the time in the world.

Genie: Alithea, how can it be a mistake to love someone entirely?

Alithea: Well, I'm beginning to think that I'm in the presence of a trickster.
Genie: That would be so much better. My work would be so much easier. But the truth is, I am just an idiot who has been extravagantly unlucky.
Alithea: Well, I have to take your word for that.

[from trailer]
Alithea: [on the flask] I like it. Whatever it is, I'm sure it has an interesting story.

Genie: I visited the Collider, an interesting gizmo...

[Last lines]
Alithea: [narrates] He would visit from time to time, and they would grasp each vivid moment. Despite the pain of the raucous skies, he always stayed longer than he should, long after she begged him to leave. He promised to return in her lifetime, and for her, that was more than enough.

Alithea: This is the story you've been avoiding telling me all along.
Genie: This is the story I've avoided telling even myself

Genie: I was imprisoned by Solomon precisely because I cried out my heart's desire. Only by granting you yours may I earn my release!

[from trailer]
Alithea: I do have a question. What does one do with three wishes?
Genie: You'll see.

Alithea: I *will* make three wishes. I will.
Genie: Before you die.
Alithea: Right now. One after the other. Ready?
Genie: Uh-huh.
Alithea: Number one, I wish your headache were gone. Number two, I wish for a sip of this tea. And finally, I wish for another one of those.

Alithea: How can you rely on those called upon to wish?

Genie: She began to rebel even against the gestures of submission that her husband required for she had acquired a mastery of love-craft, out of reach of any human that had not made love to a Djinn.

Genie: She
[Sheba]
Genie: was not beautiful, she was beauty itself.

[from trailer]
Genie: MAKE A WISH! SAVE YOURSELF!

Clementine: It's not a fact, it's an opinion, and you're wrong!

Iblis: [Islamic Satan] You are not wanted here! If she does not wish, you are doomed!

[from trailer]
Alithea: You know, I'm beginning to wish we'd never met!
[the flask cracks]
Genie: NO! DON'T SAY THAT!

Clementine: Why would Dr. Binnie waste her time and intelligence studying the ways of others instead of upholding our own?
Fanny: Embarrassed by our British culture, are we?
Alithea: No. No, I am more likely to be embarrassed by anybody reflexively frightened of anybody different.
Clementine: What exactly are you saying?
Fanny: She's calling us bigots.
Alithea: Your words, not mine.

Clementine: [Sweet Old Lady] Oi, fuckface!

Alithea: I know all the stories there are about trickster Djinn, and the ways in which they manipulate wishing to their own ends.

Alithea: I cannot, for the life of me, summon up one eligible wish. And you're asking me for three?
Genie: Is there any life in you? Are you even alive?
Alithea: You know, in some cultures, abstinence from desire means enlightenment!
Genie: Then you are a pious fool!
Alithea: If I'm content, why tempt fate?
Genie: And you're a coward!

Alithea: [narrates] If there is fate, who can say? But I tell you this: in the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, there are sixty-two streets, and four thousand shops. And in one of those shops, there are three rooms. In the smallest of those rooms, there was a pile of things unsorted, old and new. From the bottom of that pile, I chose a memento.
[picks up a flask]

Clementine: She's been talking to herself again.

Genie: And there I am, left to my own oblivion, with no one to hear my voice, no one to know me, nor feel me, nor sense me. You can't imagine.
Alithea: Well, actually, I can.
Genie: Can you imagine the loneliness? How it might overwhelm?
Alithea: I can.
Alithea: We exist only if we are real to others. Do you agree?
Alithea: I do.
Genie: This, then, is our fate, Alithea. If you make no wish at all, I will be caught between worlds, invisible and alone, for all time.

Genie: [pulls a man from the TV] Would you like this little Albert Einstein?
Alithea: No! No, no, no. That can't be good for him. Put him back!
Genie: I could expand him. We could speak with him.
Alithea: No, put him back!
Genie: Is that a wish?
Alithea: No, it's your obligation!
[the genie sends Einstein back to the TV]

[first lines]
Alithea: [narrating] My name is Alithea. My story is true. You're more likely to believe me, however, if I tell it as a fairy tale. So, once upon a time when humans hurtled across the sky on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, when they held in their hands glass tiles that could coax love songs from the air, there was a woman, adequately happy and alone. Alone by choice.
Alithea: Happy because she was independent, living off the exercise of her scholarly mind. Her business was story. She was a narratologist, who sought to find the truths common to all the stories of humankind. To this end, once or twice a year, she ventured to strange lands. To China, the South Seas, and the timeless cities of the Levant, where her kind gathered to tell stories about stories.

Alithea: I thought I might grieve a loss and betrayal, but, uh, no, in fact, I was free. I was like a prisoner emerging from a dungeon into the sunlight. I expanded into the space of my own life. No, I could not wish for more.