- [on Hank and Terry]
- Edith Evans: I think he want to have sex with her.
- Jack Linden: Why?
- Edith Evans: Why?
- Jack Linden: Yeah.
- Edith Evans: Because he likes her and she's pretty. And he hasn't had any strange pussy since that French cunt.
- [last lines]
- Edith Evans: I'm not leaving you because you're unfaith Hank, I'm leaving because I was.
- Hank Evans: Look, none of that matters any more. It's over. Isn't it? Isn't it, Edith?
- Edith Evans: Yeah. It's over.
- Hank Evans: Well then, why leave now?
- Edith Evans: Because I can.
- Hank Evans: What is the name of this dance?
- Irish Dance Know-It-All: The Angry Housewife.
- Edith Evans: [laugh]
- Jack Linden: [stamping on his last pack] They're pissing me off, they're trying to kill me.
- Hank Evans: Cigarettes don't have souls, Jack. They don't mean you any harm.
- Jack Linden: [to his married mistress] You know, you're a funny girl. After a long carnivorous fuck, you're talking about a marriage counselor? Who are you?
- Hank Evans: Look, just love everybody you can. Love your kids, love your wife, keep the peace. Then once, just once, try fucking somebody else just 'cos it feels good. Your wife, you know, may be living exactly according to these principles.
- Hank Evans: Go to school.
- Sharon Evans: It's summer. I don't have to. You go to school.
- Hank Evans: It's Saturday. I don't have to.
- Terry Linden: You say, "You are what you do"? Who really believes that? I mean, what does that mean? Does that mean I'm a cook, an errand runner, a fucker, a goddamn cleaning lady? Because if you, you bastard, lost all discipline and folded up, and turned drunk and got bald and lost everything, I'd love you. I love you. You, Jack.
- Jack Linden: [voice over, Reading from Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"] It occurred to him that what had seemed impossible before - that he had not spent his life as he should have - might, after all, be true. His professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life, of his family might all have been false.
- Jack Linden: He tried to defend all of those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending - there was nothing to defend.
- Unknown student: Bo-ring.
- Jack Linden: Jim?
- Joe Ritchie: So, everything in his life turns out to be false?
- Female student: He sure doesn't do much about it.
- Jack Linden: Doesn't do much? He finds God.
- Female student: That tiny bit at the end? About seeing a light and there being no more pain, is that it?
- Jack Linden: Heh. Well, the guy does do one major thing...
- Unknown student: What's that?
- Jack Linden: He dies. Or maybe Tolstoy didn't have it in his head to write some big uplifting story about the way we're supposed to live our lives. Maybe he just wanted to show us what it was like to die.
- Edith Evans: You know what I wanted. I wanted to know where we were. Now I know.
- Jack Linden: And?
- Edith Evans: You love the person you're having the affair with.
- Edith Evans: [referring to her husband] He'll be busting out soon. Trust me - I know the routine. He's been hibernating with that novel so long, next thing you know he'll look around and blink and fuck the first thing that walks into his office.
- Jack Linden: Jesus, I hope someone goes in there before I do.
- Edith Evans: Well, he screws his wife once in a while, why not another man?
- Jack Linden: And your husband making passes at my wife, how do you feel about that?
- Edith Evans: Well, everybody deserves to be happy, right?
- Edith Evans: I wonder how we'll get caught.
- Jack Linden: Hank'll smell you on me at the gym.
- Edith Evans: No, I mean Terry.
- Jack Linden: Men have left their wives for other women and been happy.
- Hank Evans: Until they start cheating on their new wife.
- Edith Evans: He said he was happy for us, and now he's sad for us. He's happy that you were taking care of me, and now he's sorry that you can't.
- Terry Linden: You're being published. It doesn't get any better than that, does it?
- Hank Evans: It's just a poem, Terry, it's really not that important.
- Terry Linden: No, Hank, it isn't. If you want important, go work in a cancer ward with people who are puking from chemo. Or teach math to a kid who's brain damaged from fetal alcohol syndrome.
- Hank Evans: No, those people aren't generally that much fun to be around.
- [both laugh]