“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

After all these years, Mandy Patinkin can still easily recite his most famous lines from “The Princess Bride” movie. But they’re not the words that mean the most to him.

Those came later in the movie, when Patinkin, as his character Inigo Montoya, says: “I have been in the revenge business so long, now that’s over, I do not know what to do with the rest of my life”

The import of those lines came to him later in his life.

“As a young man,” Patinkin says, “I think I was in a bit of the revenge business for too many years of my life. And, you know, somewhere in the past 10 years, I stopped being so angry and started being a little more grateful, literally for the sunrise and the sunsets and my kids and my family and the gifts I’ve been given. And then I saw that movie… and I heard that line.

And as a young man I remember saying it, I went back and looked at my script to see what notes I’d put in, and I really didn’t have any notes for that line. I just said it, and I didn’t realize what I was saying. And then I heard it as a grown up or whatever you want to call me, and it-it meant everything to me today.” (Melissa Block, October 5, 2012, “Mandy Patinkin: 25 Years After ‘The Princess Bride,’ He’s Not Tired of That Line.” NPR.)

Twelve years later, Patinkin reflected on those lines in another NPR interview. (Scott Simon, February 12, 2024, “A family of creatives turned their TikTok-famous videos into a stage performance.” NPR.)

The words had become even more meaningful.   

“The Man in Black asks me if I’d like to be the next Dread Pirate Roberts. And I say to him these lines that 36-year-old Mandy said and didn’t really ever hear them until I was 50-something, and no one ever quotes them. And I think they are the unconscious and conscious greatest lines I’d ever heard that I didn’t understand until I was in my 50s. Which are these words – (imitating Inigo Montoya) ‘You know, I have been in the revenge business so long. Now that it’s over, I do not know what to do with the rest of my life.‘”

And when you think about it, how revenge pushes the buttons of the horrors we are watching every second, every day, globally, in our lives, across this planet. Inigo Montoya did not get his father back by killing the six-fingered man. You do not get anything back from revenge.”

Listen to Patinkin discuss more about this in the CBS This Morning Extras YouTube video and in the article he wrote for Time Magazine in December 18, 2015.

Lines from movies often speak to us. Sometimes what we hear changes over time. And sometimes, someone may quote lines in a way that is different from how you see them or from what the writer had intended. 

Read Stephen Shulze’s reflection about the line, “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.” from Clint Eastwood’s film, “Unforgiven.” His interpretation made me think about the line in a whole new way. What do you think?

What lines from a movie have spoken to you? How has it (or you) changed? Share your story at Building Bridges Word by Word.