"Life Is Awesome" Speech - TV Tropes

"You see, George, you've really had a wonderful life. Don't you see what a mistake it would be to throw it away?"

• Ah! My Goddess: Belldandy, as a Friend to All Living Things and a literal goddess, tends to hand out speeches like this as though they were penny candies. In the OAV, she explains to Urd why it is that she finds joy in what Urd calls "domestic chores" like baking when she could just use magic to make what she wants. Small wonder that the man she fell in love with is an engineering student who enjoys tinkering with old machinery. In the TV series, she gives a similar speech to Skuld when she starts knitting a sweater for Keiichi for Christmas.
• The Dangers in My Heart: During his Love Confession, and to ensure she goes to a Live Action audition she wanted rather than stay for his sake, Ichikawa asserts to Yamada that he's been having a lot more fun in school than he has been at the start. Even without her around, and also largely because of her. Later on, Ichikawa helps his older sister write lyrics for her band, which is another speech in song form.

  Ichikawa: You showed me that... this world is so beautiful.

• Usagi-chan de Cue!!: An explosion causes the concourse where Haru and Miku were standing to crumble and collapse. As the two begin to plummet to certain doom, Inaba sees this, and hesitates, unsure if her effort will be for naught. Then, the voice of Mimika the rabbit pipes up, asking what is most precious to Inaba right now. Mimika gives further heart to Inaba by declaring, "Tomorrow will surely be fun!" This speech propels Inaba to make the effort to save Haru and Miku, and to tap into the powers of a rabbit to make the superhuman leap to catch them.

• Death: The High Cost of Living: Who would have thought that an anthropomorphic personification of Death itself would find life to be amazing? And yet, Neil Gaiman's interpretation of Death, which started back in the The Sandman (1989) story "The Sound of Her Wings", loves Mary Poppins (especially Dick Van Dyke's Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping), eating hot dogs, and chatting with people. She spends one day every hundred years as a living person so that she can better understand the lives she takes. She began doing so after one person asked her an Armor-Piercing Question ("Well, how would you like it?"). She decided to find out. When her business aspect came to collect herself as a living being, she gave herself a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, and it stuck with her, to the point where she became more sympathetic and understanding of the souls she claims.

  Didi (Death's human aspect): I wish it could have gone on forever, that it didn't have to end like that.

  Death (supernatural aspect): It always ends. That's what gives it value.

• Fight Club: Tyler Durden drags a convenience store clerk out of his business and holds a gun on him, not to rob him, but to provide a strange sort of motivating force. Raymond K. Hessle, as he learns the clerk is named, gave up on his dream of being a veterinarian because of the difficulty involved. Tyler points the gun at him (which we later learn is empty), and tells Hessle that if he is not well on his way to becoming a veterinarian the next time Durden checks in on him, he will kill him. When the narrator character (and unbeknownst to himself at the time, actually Tyler Durden), asks Durden why he did that, Tyler gives us this:

  Tyler Durden: Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessle’s life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever had.

• Hook: As Hook rightfully sums up in an attempt at a Breaking Speech, Peter Banning was, at the start of the film, "a selfish man who drinks too much, is obsessed with success, and runs and hides from his wife and children". However, Peter has by this point recovered his memories of being Peter Pan, has found his happy thoughts in the fact that he was a father, with a loving wife, and he defeats Hook. When he returns home with his children, the aged Wendy Darling asks him, "No more adventures left, Boy?" Peter replies, "Oh, no. To live. To live would be an awfully big adventure."
• It's a Wonderful Life: George Bailey is contemplating suicide when a theft of opportunity by evil Mr. Potter makes it look like George has embezzled a ton of money from his Savings & Loan company. Heaven intervenes, sending Clarence down to help talk George out of it by showing him what a bleak and miserable place the world would have been without him in it. George finds himself begging to have his life again.
• Stranger Than Fiction: When Professor Hilbert finds that there's no way of predicting the kind of story Harold is trapped in, facing his untimely death, he tells Harold to stop fretting about it and just enjoy the time he's got left. When Harold asks how, Hilbert tells him to travel, learn a musical instrument, or just eat nothing but pancakes if he wants.

  Harold Crick: You have to understand that this isn't a philosophy or a literary theory or a story to me. It's my life.

  Professor Jules Hilbert: Absolutely. So just go make it the one you've always wanted.

• Twilight Zone: The Movie: One segment of the film has a retirement home where the residents are worn down and tired, save for one newcomer, a man named Mr. Bloom (played by Scatman Crothers). Mr. Bloom encourages the others to play a late-night game of kick-the-can, and doing so causes them all to revert to children, except for Mr. Bloom, who stays his own age, explaining that he learned long ago that it was better for him to maintain his true age, but keep a fresh, young mind. The others, save one, voice their agreement, and return to being adults (again, save one), and find themselves much happier and more willing to venture out and do things. Cue Bloom moving on to the next retirement home to spread his magic there.

• The Screwtape Letters: Screwtape laments in one letter to Wormwood that they often wish their "patients" long life because it is necessary to knit a man to the world in order to keep him from Heaven. However, he also admits this is a problem because even if they keep the man ignorant of religion, life and living can make a man aware, all the same.

  Screwtape: Even if we contrive to keep them ignorant of explicit religion, the incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry—the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon—are always blowing our whole structure away.

• Doctor Who: The Doctor has been hundreds of years old since we first met themm. Pick a Doctor, any Doctor, and you will undoubtedly find them giving a speech on the wonders of life. Perhaps, however, one of the most surprising sources for such a speech came not from The Doctor, but from one of their mortal enemies, the ever Omnicidal Maniacs, the Daleks. "Rusty" was a Dalek who had been damaged, and, drifting in space, had an epiphany about the futility of the Dalek purpose of wiping out all non-Dalek life after witnessing a star being born.

  Dalek "Rusty": Life returns. Life prevails. Resistance is futile.

• Torchwood: At the end of "Random Shoes", Eugene Jones, who had spent the entire episode as a ghost, moves on to the afterlife, but not before providing a Posthumous Narration about how marvelous life is, and how important it is to live it due to how fast it passes you by.

  Eugene Jones: The average life is full of near misses and absolute hits, of great love and small disasters. It's made up of banana milkshakes, loft insulation, and random shoes. It's dead ordinary and truly, truly amazing. What you've got to realise is, it's all here, now. So breathe deep and swallow it whole. Because take it from me, life just whizzes by, and then, all of a sudden, it's--

• The Twilight Zone (1959): "Walking Distance" has tired businessman Martin Sloan needing to stop to get his car worked on "walking distance" from his old hometown. He finds himself in his own past and ends up causing his past self to receive an injury that left a permanent scar. His older self meets his father, who explains to him that this past is not for him to share with his younger self, but for his younger self to live.

  Robert Sloan: Maybe when you go back, Martin, you'll find that there are merry-go-rounds and band concerts where you are. Maybe you haven't been looking in the right place. You've been looking behind you, Martin. Try looking ahead.

• In The Madwoman of Chaillot, after Countess Aurelia encounters a suicidal young man, Pierre (who she calls Roderick), attempting to jump off a bridge, she talks him out of suicide by regaling him about how she finds the will to get up every morning, even as she's gotten old and her true love is long gone.

  "To be alive is to be fortunate, Roderick. Of course, in the morning, when you first awake, it does not always seem so very gay. When you take your hair out of the drawer and your teeth out of the glass, you are apt to feel a little out of place in this world. Especially if you've just been dreaming that you're a little girl on a pony looking for strawberries in the woods. But all you need to feel the call of life once more is a letter in your mail giving you your schedule for the day - your mending, your shopping, that letter to your grandmother that you never seem to get around to... then you're armed, you're strong, you're ready - you can begin again. After that, everything is pure delight."

• Ride the Cyclone: Constance, a Shrinking Violet who had been one of the only people in Uranium to not consider it a Hated Hometown, describes how, moments before her death, she saw all the little things in her life that she'd loved. She laments that she didn't realize how much her life meant to her until it was seconds away from ending, but then launches into her song "Sugar Cloud", about the joy she experienced in those moments.

  Constance: I didn’t scream like the other kids. No, I was just soaking it all in, 'cause on a certain level it was so rad! Sailing through the air upside down, you could see all the other rides. And it was like something unlocked in me; my heart just welled up with all this love for everything. Images and all this feeling flooded into me. Like climbing back into my bed in the morning and feeling the heat left over from my body, hanging upside down from the monkey bars until my head starts to tingle, smelling jiffy markers. Listening to music and dancing around my room before going out to a party and pretending I’m going to have the perfect time... Finishing an essay, undoing a knot, pizza night, Halloween, watching my baby brother dance naked to ABBA, being in the choir at the height of the Hallelujah chorus and feeling all the voices rattle my bones! I started laughing like a crazy person, giddy with endorphins, all dancing leprechauns and rainbows and unicorns, streams of chocolate, whirling rides, flashing lights! There's no shame in loving my small town. The only good things that happened to me happened in Uranium. It took a horrible accident for me to realize how goddamn wonderful everything is.

• Animaniacs: "Meatballs or Consequences" has Death claim Wakko when the latter passes out from consuming too many meatballs in an eating contest. With their usual antics of annoyance and zany wordplay, Yakko and Dot convince Death to first take them all, then subsequently release them all. When Wakko asks why they did it, they give a speech that hangs a Lampshade on the whole thing.

  Dot: There's more to life than just living, Wakko. There's loyalty, courage, and the bonds of love that bind a family together.

  Yakko: Dot's right. It's not death we should fear, but a life poorly lived, for nothing is worse than squandering this most precious gift of our creator. Spielberg eats this stuff up.

• Justice League Unlimited: In "The Return" Amazo is returning to Earth looking for Lex Luthor. The reason? Not for revenge, as everyone, Luthor included, assumes, but because Amazo is Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life.

  Lex Luthor: The truth is, for all my struggles to make my mark in life, for all I've accomplished, in just a few short generations my name will be forgotten. Even the greatest of us can't compete with time... and death.

  Amazo: Then why do you go on? Why does anyone? Why don't I just destroy you and everything else right now? All it would take is a single thought and...

  Lex Luthor: No! If you do that, you won't see the end of it!

  Amazo: The end of what?

  Lex Luthor: The evolutionary process. You of all beings should know something about that.

  Amazo: Yes. Yes, I'm evolving. That's why Professor Ivo made me. These past months I have amassed so much knowledge, and yet... I remain confused... empty. What am I evolving into? What is my purpose? I must know! Tell me!

  Lex Luthor: There's no way to tell. And that's why I stay in the game. My purpose, if you will, is to see where it's all going. And you! You'll live forever. You'll be able to see it all.

  Amazo: Is that my purpose? Simply to be... a witness?

  Lex Luthor: We create our own purpose in life. Now go create yours.