- Detective Rust Cohle: In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So death created time to grow the things that it would kill... and you are reborn but into the same life that you've always been born into. I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, detectives? Well, who knows? When you can't remember your lives, you can't change your lives, and that is the terrible and the secret fate of all life. You're trapped... like a nightmare you keep waking up into.
- Detective Rust Cohle: Years. You ever heard something called M-Brane theory detectives?
- Detective Thomas Papania: No. That's over my head.
- Detective Rust Cohle: It's like in this universe we process time linearly forward. But outside of our space time from what would be a fourth dimensional perspective time wouldn't exist. And from that vantage could we attain it? We see our space time would look flattened. Like a single sculpture of matter and super-position of every place it ever occupied. Our sentience is just cycling through our lives like carts on a track. See everything outside our dimension that's eternity. Eternity looking down on us. Now to us its a sphere but to them its a circle.
- Detective Maynard Gilbough: Mr Cohle? Mr Cohle. What happened in two thousand and two?
- Detective Rust Cohle: If you wanna arrest me, go ahead. You wanna follow me? Come on. You wanna see something? Get a warrant. Thanks for the beer. Beyond that you wasted my fucking day, company men.
- Detective Marty Hart: You know the good years when you're in them, or you just wait for them until you get ass cancer and realize that the good years came and went? Because there's a feeling you might notice it sometimes... this feeling like life has slipped through your fingers... like the future is behind you, like it's always been behind you.
- Detective Marty Hart: Well, if you two talked to Rust, you weren't getting a read on him... He was getting a read on you.
- Dewall: I can see your soul at the edges of your eyes. It's corrosive, like acid. You got a demon, little man. And I don't like your face. It makes me wanna do things to it.
- Detective Maynard Gilbough: You know what happened there between them?
- Detective Marty Hart: What always happens between men and women?... Reality.
- Reggie Ledoux: I saw you in my dream. You're in Carcosa now with me... He sees you... You'll do this again... Time is a flat circle.