The Seventh Seal

Antonius Block: "I want to confess as honestly as I can but my heart is empty. And the emptiness is a mirror turned toward my own face. I see myself in it, and it fills me with loathing and horror. My indifference to my fellow men has cut me off from their company. I live now in a world of phantoms, a prisoner of my own dreams."
Death: "Yet you don't want to die."
"Yes, I do.'
"What are you waiting for?"
"I don't know..."
"You want a guarantee."
"Call it what you will. Must it be so cruelly inconceivable to know God through one's senses? Why must He hide in a fog of half-spoken promises and unseen miracles? How can we believe the believers when we don't believe ourselves? What will become of us who want to believe but cannot? And what of those who neither will nor can believe? Why can I not kill off this God within me? Why must He live on inside of me in this painful, humiliating way when I want to tear him out of my heart? Why does He remain a mocking reality that I cannot shake off? You hear me?"
"I hear you."
"I want knowledge. Not faith or conjecture, but knowledge. I want God to reach out His hand, show His face, speak to me.'
"But He is silent"
"I cry to Him in the darkness, but sometimes it feels like no one is there."
"Perhaps no one is there."
"Then life is just a senseless horror. No man can live facing death knowing that everything is nothingness."
"Most people give no thought to death or nothingness."
"One day they'll stand on the far edge of life, peering into the darkness.'
"Ah, that day."
"I understand what you mean. We carve an idol out of our fear and call it God....My whole life has been nothing but futile wandering and pursuits, a great deal of talk without meaning. It's all been in vain. I say that without bitterness or self-reproach, knowing that most men's lives are the same. But I want to use my reprieve for one meaningful act."

~Ingmar Bergman