1 quote from Neon Genesis Evangelion, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
“Anywhere can be paradise as long as you have the will to live. After all, you are alive, so you will always have the chance to be happy. As long as the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth exist, everything will be all right.”
Every Neon Genesis Evangelion quote All characters, by series
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Of everything in a film built to resist being quoted, this is the film's weakest sentence. It is spoken by Yui, the mother whose soul is inside Unit-01, to a son she abandoned to reach that state; her advice about the will to live comes from a woman who chose to become a monument. The film knows this. The next exchange has Fuyutsuki asking whether the Eva was a clone of God and Yui answering that it will exist forever, lonely, so long as one person remains, and Fuyutsuki finishing that it will be eternal proof that Mankind ever existed, which is not a mother's comfort but a scientist's ambition wearing one. Read the paradise line as sincere and the ending is a hug. Read it as the last word of the person most responsible for Shinji's condition and the beach afterwards, with its strangling and its single sick word, is the film refusing the hug. The second reading is the one the images support. The quote survives because it is the only line in the film that works without them.