- Billy Kwan: -Don't think about the major issues. You do what you can about the misery in front of you. You add your light to the sum of all light.
- Billy Kwan: Krishna says to him, "All is clouded by desire, Arjuna, as a fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust. From these, it blinds the soul."
- Kumar: At least they will give us discipline.
- Billy Kwan: Stalin had good Discipline. He wiped out 10 million.
- Billy Kwan: We'll make a great team, old man. You for the words, me for the pictures. I can be your eyes.
- Billy Kwan: [Despairing over a shift in Guy Hamilton's values] Why can't you give yourself? Why can't you learn to love?
- Jill Bryant: [remarking on one of Guy's articles] I found it a bit melodramatic. That's only my opinion, my flatmate was moved to tears. So, there you are.
- Guy Hamilton: What does it take to move you to tears, eh?
- [last lines]
- Guy Hamilton: Kumar, I am sorry.
- Kumar: Don't worry. We're going to win, because we believe in something.
- Guy Hamilton: Goodbye, Kumar.
- Kumar: Think of me Guy, when you are sitting in some nice cafe in Europe. In my dreams, I am always sitting at the table, by the footpath, drinking coffee.
- Guy Hamilton: Good Luck.
- Kumar: Now go, quickly!
- Billy Kwan: I believed in you. I thought you were a man of light. That's why I gave you those stories you think are so important. I made you see things. I made you feel something about is right. I gave you my trust. So did Jill. I created you.
- Billy Kwan: [as Billy and Guy enter a very poor area] "And the people asked Him, saying, 'What shall we do then?"'
- Guy Hamilton: What's that?
- Billy Kwan: It's from Luke. Chapter 3, verse 10. "What then must we do?" Tolstoy asked the same question. He wrote a book with that title. He got so upset about the poverty in Moscow that he went one night into the poorest section and just gave away all his money. You could do that now. Five American dollars would be a fortune to one of these people.
- Guy Hamilton: Wouldn't do any good. Just be a drop in the ocean.
- Billy Kwan: Ah. That's the same conclusion Tolstoy came to. I disagree.
- Guy Hamilton: What's your solution?
- Billy Kwan: Well, I support the view that you just don't think about the major issues. You do whatever you can about the misery that's in front of you. Add your light to the sum of light. You think that's naïve?
- Guy Hamilton: Yup.
- Billy Kwan: It's all right. Most journalists do.
- Guy Hamilton: We can't afford to get involved.
- Billy Kwan: Typical journo's answer.
- Guy Hamilton: The situation: surviving on a few handfuls of rice on this famine-stricken island of Lombok. But, it's the faces you can't forget. Like images in a reoccurring nightmare, they just keep coming back. Haunted faces. Starring blankly back from the windows of tumbled down hovels. The hollow, lifeless eyes. Skin stretched tight across bones. Hands outstretched. Dull, listless eyes imploring. I move as if in a dream - through the agony that is famine. This is Guy Hamilton, in Lombok, for ABS Magazine.
- Billy Kwan: Most of us become children again when we enter the slums of Asia. And last night I watched you walk back into childhood. With all its opposite intensities: laughter and misery, the crazy and the grim, toy town and a city of fear.
- Pete Curtis: So, Hamilton, you really think Sukarno's going to let the commies have their own little private army?
- Guy Hamilton: That's what Aidit says.
- Pete Curtis: Aidit's lying.
- Guy Hamilton: Maybe.
- Pete Curtis: Then why report it?
- Guy Hamilton: Maybe he's *not* lying.
- Pete Curtis: Let me ask you something. I've worried about this since you got here. What do you do for sex?
- Guy Hamilton: You're worried about that?
- Pete Curtis: Whenever I hit the front page, I get a hard-on. So what do you do? I go up to the cemetery.
- Guy Hamilton: [chuckling] Are you a necrophiliac?
- Billy Kwan: It's where the prostitutes hang out.
- Pete Curtis: Fantastic girls, Hamilton. Best value-for-your-money ass in Asia. I'll take you up there right now, huh?
- Guy Hamilton: Some other time.
- Wally O'Sullivan: Wise man.
- Kevin Condon: They're riddled with VD.
- Pete Curtis: You never heard of penicillin? You will love this action. You want to spend the night? Costs you one dollar.
- Billy Kwan: Starvation's a great aphrodisiac.
- Hortono: [Dropping Guy Hamilton off at the entry gate to the Sukarno palace and compound; Hamilton must get approval to pass by an armed sentry] Boss, take off your sunglasses when you go in. Palace guards say they can tell assassin by his eyes.
- Billy Kwan: Are you going to this?
- Guy Hamilton: You're joking.
- Billy Kwan: You might learn something.
- Guy Hamilton: I doubt it. The British don't let much slip.
- Billy Kwan: Oh, yes they do. They're just more subtle. You ought to listen harder.
- Guy Hamilton: [Joining the other journalists at the Sukarno compound who are awaiting any news] Missed anything?
- Wally O'Sullivan: Yeah, 63 minutes of excruciating boredom.
- Kevin Condon: I got a feeling he's gonna' make a pronouncement this morning.
- Pete Curtis: Oh, really, Kevin?
- Guy Hamilton: What makes you say that?
- Kevin Condon: Just a thought.
- Pete Curtis: Yeah? When a thought crosses your mind, it's been on the shortest trip in Jakarta.
- Billy Kwan: But the one great advantage of being a dwarf is that you can be wiser than other people and no one envies you.
- Guy Hamilton: You're not a dwarf.
- Billy Kwan: That's what I like about you, Guy. You really don't care, do you? Or, maybe you just don't see.
- Billy Kwan: What do you think of her?
- Guy Hamilton: Who?
- Guy Hamilton: [Kwan indicates a photo of Jill] Not my type.
- Billy Kwan: Oh. Why's that?
- Guy Hamilton: It's her attitude. You know how the British can be so damn superior? It's like the colonel with his gin, tonic and ice.
- Billy Kwan: Jill is not like that at all.
- Guy Hamilton: [asking about Kumar] Tiger Lily? What's the matter with him?
- Tiger Lily: He's having troubles with the military.
- Guy Hamilton: What sort of trouble?
- Tiger Lily: His father has a small shop. Each week the military comes to ask for money. He has no more money, and he's afraid.
- Kumar: [Hamilton pulls out a roll of bills] No, boss. I'm not looking for handouts.
- Guy Hamilton: I get more than that each week exchanging dollars on the black market.
- Guy Hamilton: [Kumar refuses the offer, but Hamilton pushes the money onto him] Don't be stupid, Kumar. Keep the dough.
- Kumar: [relenting] For my father, I'll play the beggar
- Billy Kwan: [narrating, from the pages of his personal files that he keeps on various people] Bryant, Jillian Edith. Nationality: British. Born: 1938, under the sign of Pisces. Occupation: Assistant to military attaché... British Embassy, Jakarta. Former postings: Brussels, Singapore.
- Billy Kwan: [continues] Little religious feeling, yet has a reverence for life. This is a spirit like a wavering flame which only needs care to burn high. If this does not happen, she could lapse into the promiscuity and bitterness of the failed romantic.
- Billy Kwan: That's the real Jakarta. Scrounging for a few handfuls of rice to keep them alive another day. That's a story you journalists don't tell in your reports.
- Guy Hamilton: Well, nobody wants to hear it.
- Billy Kwan: Tell them anyway!
- Billy Kwan: You like my puppets? If you want to understand Java, you have to understand Wayang: the sacred shadow play. The puppet master is a priest. That's why they call Sukarno the great puppet master - balancing the left with the right. Their shadows are souls and the screen is heaven. You must watch their shadows, not the puppets. The right in constant struggle with left. The forces of light and darkness in endless balance. In the West we want answers for everything. Everything is right or wrong. Good or bad. But, in wayang, no such final conclusions exists.
- Billy Kwan: Here, on the quiet page, I'm master. Just as I'm master in the darkroom, stirring my prints in a magic developing bath. I shuffle like cards the lives I deal with. Their faces stare out at me. People who will become old, betray their dreams, become ghosts.
- Guy Hamilton: Hey, look, I just want to see you again...
- Jill Bryant: Oh, look, I'm leaving so soon, what's the point of complicating things now?
- Guy Hamilton: What's complicated about eating?
- Kumar: Mr. Billy Kwan was right. Westerners do not have answers any more. Water from the Moon.
- Guy Hamilton: What does that mean, Kumar?
- Kumar: It's an old Japanese saying. It means something one can never have.
- Pete Curtis: [after Hamilton has upstaged his fellow journalists by gaining an interview with the head of the Indonesian Communist Party, creating some resentment amongst them] That's bullshit!
- Wally O'Sullivan: The worrying thing is, it's well-written bullshit, and it's right here in my paper... I must confess, Hamilton, that I probably would have infused it with a little more skepticism, but bitter resentment won't prevent me from admitting it was a good piece. Well done.
- Guy Hamilton: What do you do at the embassy? Apart from socializing?
- Jill Bryant: I work with Ralph.
- Guy Hamilton: You a spy? You're a spook, aren't you?
- Jill Bryant: If I were, I'd hardly tell you, would I?
- Billy Kwan: You're an enemy here, Hamilton. Like all westerners. President Sukarno tells the West to, "Go to Hell!" And, today, Sukarno is the voice of the third world.
- Billy Kwan: Don't take it personally. You're just a symbol of the West.
- Guy Hamilton: I feel more like a spittoon.
- Guy Hamilton: Ten years I've waited for this and if I mess it up they'll send me back to the newsroom in Sydney and that's a bloody graveyard.
- Jill Bryant: They always do that.
- Guy Hamilton: What?
- Jill Bryant: They want to touch your white skin.
- Guy Hamilton: He was supposed to stay around here and brief me.
- Kumar: He said he was sorry. His wife was sick.
- Guy Hamilton: Of what? Him?
- Kumar: No, of Jakarta, boss.
- [first lines]
- Billy Kwan: June 25th, 1965. Dossier H-10. Hamilton, Guy. Born 1936 under the sign of Capricorn. Occupation: Journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Service. Jakarta: first assignment as foreign correspondent.
- Guy Hamilton: In short, Jakarta is a city where the questions outnumber the answers. But, one thing is certain, that Sukarno's tightrope shuffle between the Communists PKI and the right wing military, is looking more precarious as the hours tick by. This is Guy Hamilton, in Jakarta, for ABS News.
- Jill Bryant: [after Colonel Henderson challenges Guy to a swimming race] When Ralph says race, he means it.
- Colonel Henderson: Well, there's no sense in being half-hearted.
- Billy Kwan: Games are a serious business with the English. Right, Colonel?
- Colonel Henderson: They have their place.