But this line, said almost as a reflex, ends up carrying real weight, especially when you notice when and how often she actually says it. Dialogue of the Day: Dory isn’t exactly the character you’d expect wisdom from. She forgets things almost instantly, gets distracted mid-sentence, and generally seems like comic relief more than anything else.
Released in 2003 and directed by Andrew Stanton, Finding Nemo follows Marlin, an anxious clownfish, as he searches the ocean for his missing son, aided along the way by Dory, a forgetful but endlessly optimistic blue tang. Because it manages to turn a fish’s memory problem into one of the more genuine statements about resilience that animation has produced, featuring the voices of Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres as Dory, the film became one of Pixar’s most beloved releases, and this particular line remains one of its most quoted, mostly.
That’s probably why this line has stuck around so widely, quoted well outside the context of the film, plastered on posters and used as reassurance during hard stretches of life that have nothing to do with fish or oceans. It doesn’t promise things will get easier. It just offers the one thing that’s actually within reach when everything else feels uncertain, the choice to keep going anyway.
