- Preacher: Jezebel! That's right, I mean you! Now both of you sinners are hurrying past.
- Dove Linkhorn: You got no business with us mister.
- Preacher: Oh, sinners is my business. You and that hip-slinging daughter of Satan. You know there's the smell of sulfur and brimstone about you. The smell of hellfire.
- Dove Linkhorn: Who ordained preacher?
- Preacher: I am self-ordained son; I had the call.
- Dove Linkhorn: You were called by the wrong voice mister.
- Preacher: Lord strike this sinner down. Send a bolt down to smite and consume the blasphemer now!
- Dove Linkhorn: He won't hear you. Cause you no friend of God or man - standing there hollering hate to the world. God is love. God is mercy and forgiveness. Try preaching that sometime Mr. Preacher. Teach people to forgive, not to crawl in fear. Teach people to love, not hate. preach the good book - preach the truth.
- Dove Linkhorn: What are you doing here, Kitty?
- Kitty Twist: [licking a cigarette after the statement] I run the candy concession.
- Hallie: He's a sculptor, darling. Like Michelangelo, Maillol, Rodin and me.
- Frank Bonito: Last time you told me you wrote poetry.
- Hallie: No. I just echo it.
- Hallie: I'm a sculptress. Or rather, I used to be before I fell down the well. But it's a very nice well. Cozy. And all the little frogs love me. And the big frog, Madame Jo, adores me. Yes, it's a very nice well. I have the run of the bottom of the well.
- Jo Courtney: Perhaps maturity will change all that.
- Hallie: What do you think I'll mature into? You?
- [Jo slaps Hallie]
- Jo Courtney: [of a bust Hallie is sculpting of her] Oh, I see you've started working again. Why don't you go back to it?
- Hallie: [despondently] Suddenly I don't feel like working.
- Jo Courtney: [brightly] All right, then let's go shopping!
- Kitty Twist: You ain't much of a talker, are you? Well, it's been my experience that the talkers ain't never cute and the cute ones ain't never talkers. And you're cute.
- Hallie: You haven't got the patience.
- Jo Courtney: Oh, you know me better than that, Hallie. Sometimes I've waited years for what I wanted.
- Dove Linkhorn: What are you so mad about?
- Kitty Twist: I'm cold and I'm hungry and a million miles from nowhere and in the middle of a wild dream - you wake me up.
- Kitty Twist: Where you headed for, Dove Linkhorn?
- Dove Linkhorn: New Orleans.
- Kitty Twist: Well, strike me blind. So am I. Oh, I am fed up with this great big, undone hunk of state. I'm going to New Orleans. They better nail it down when I arrive.
- Dove Linkhorn: Hey, you throw pretty good for a girl.
- Kitty Twist: For a girl? Hell, Walter Johnson never throwed better. I'm a big-league kid from a...
- Kitty Twist: [patting her own behind] ... big-league town.
- Dove Linkhorn: I like you, Kitty, but I don't feel like foolin'.
- Kitty Twist: Come here, and I'll make you feel like foolin'.
- Kitty Twist: I got a Ma, up in Kentucky. Like as not she's drunk herself to death by now.
- Dove Linkhorn: Kind of bad, having a Ma like that.
- Kitty Twist: Even if it stinks, it's home.
- Dove Linkhorn: I ain't seen her in three years. I'll never forget the first time I met her. We went swimming together. It was at night. The way she moved in the water, like a kind of a white flash. It was then I kissed her for the very first time. She gave me something I'd never known before. Something I ain't experienced since. Afterwards, in the moonlight, we danced like we was celebrating a miracle. A crazy kind of dancing. And then we sang and shouted like it wasn't real. As if it was in another world. Sometimes I think it never really happened to us.
- Dove Linkhorn: Stop talking like a no-good, like you don't know what's right.
- Kitty Twist: A good time is right. Everything else is wrong.
- Kitty Twist: Personally, you can give me good American food any day, but if he wants that other stuff, bring it for us, will you?
- Teresina Vidaverri: Chicharrones and tortillas?
- Kitty Twist: I hope it's easier to eat than pronounce.
- Teresina Vidaverri: What is your religion?
- Dove Linkhorn: My religion? It's a girl. Weighs about 119 pounds and gray eyes. She's French.
- Jo Courtney: My, we are depressed, aren't we?
- Hallie: No, I'm bored. And I've only just gotten up. Maybe I ought to go back to bed.
- Miss Precious: Hallie, let's get out of this place. Let's leave here.
- Hallie: To do what? Where would we go? After three years of this easy life, I don't have energy for anything else.
- Hallie: I can't stay cooped up here. I've got to break out, to find excitement. Lock me up, swallow the key, and I'll still crawl out - nibble my way out through the plaster.
- Hallie: Stop hammering at me. Stop trying to change me, because I cannot change. Oh, Jo, stop trying. Just let me go on being what I am, whatever that is.
- Miss Precious: Oh, Oliver, if you'd just as soon, I'd just as soon you not whip me if I got my sooners.
- Dove Linkhorn: I'm beginning to hate this town and everything about it. I'd like to kick it in. Shake it, bust it wide open!
- Jo Courtney: I'll tell you what. Let's spend the afternoon here. You can start a new head of me. Or my hands. You've always wanted to do my hands.
- Hallie: I'm not in the mood.
- Teresina Vidaverri: You know how it is - with a woman. When they like somebody, right away they gotta become a nuisance. I am a nuisance.
- Teresina Vidaverri: When people are kind to each other why do they have to find a dirty word for it?
- Hallie: "And when she smiled it was as if the moon came out." A remark by T.S. Eliot. Ever heard of Eliot? A bank clerk.
- Miss Precious: You must excuse my ignorance, I'm from Georgia. It's just that I've never been to Texas. But I do know about the Alamo and about the Panhandle. Now, what in the world is a panhandle? Do you know I thought it meant "to beg"?
- Hallie: She was so greedy for life. She wanted so much. Not even a husband and child were enough. She wanted to taste everything. And I am my mother's child.
- Dove Linkhorn: I'd like to know everything about you.
- Hallie: There should be secrets - unknown things.
- Hallie: After I left Texas, I went to New York. New York. A mob of six million people, and every one of them a stranger. Sometimes the weeks passed and nobody spoke to me, except a waitress, a bus driver, or a guy on the make. I was so lonely I ached all over.
- Jo Courtney: Go on and tell him. Tell him about the days and nights of Hallie Gerard. Tell him about the mud you've rolled in for years. Well, tell him!
- Jo Courtney: Oh, Hallie. Hallie. You've been dreaming. You've had a brief dream of young love and candy kisses. And it's all so foolish, so unreal.
- Jo Courtney: Too many girls end up more loaded than the clients and their so-called brains become addled. The customers take advantage of them. Think of the house, not yourself. Call me if there's any trouble or Oliver. Get yourself a gown. You can pay me back later. Oliver will show you where to buy it and what kind.