- Benjamin Hoffman: I remember the day my father introduced me to snails. "Hello, snails," I said, "How are you?" "Tres bien, merci," they said. "We who are about to be eaten salute you."
- Benjamin Hoffman: Miss Smith, you are here to be two arms, two legs, a face, and what fits in the middle.
- [Miss Smith is in the bathroom next to the bedroom where Mr Hoffman lays in bed]
- Benjamin Hoffman: Ms Smith. Take a letter.
- Miss Janet Smith: What?
- Benjamin Hoffman: Take a letter Ms Smith.
- Miss Janet Smith: [comes out of the bathroom] Now?
- Benjamin Hoffman: Yes, now! To Miss Janet Smith, care of this address. Dear Miss Smith, go to bed. Your sincerely. Mr Benjamin Hoffman.
- Benjamin Hoffman: Aspirin.
- Miss Janet Smith: Where?
- Benjamin Hoffman: In the tea.
- Miss Janet Smith: Well, I don't want them in the tea.
- Benjamin Hoffman: Ah. Um, they fell in.
- Benjamin Hoffman: Full use. Any man suffering massive sexual frustration would be out of his mind if, getting the girl of his dreams, he didn't put her to... full use.
- Benjamin Hoffman: I smell your hair in my bathroom. I smell your female skin smell in my bathroom. You can't buy that in a bottle.
- Benjamin Hoffman: All over the world, simple pleasures of the flesh are being ruined by women screaming to be understood.
- Benjamin Hoffman: Girls all over the world are afraid of men with my expression.
- Miss Janet Smith: What expression?
- Benjamin Hoffman: Plain, sad-faced men.
- Miss Janet Smith: Tom's mother says that only French railway workers eat garlic.
- Benjamin Hoffman: You're very witty, Miss Smith.
- Miss Janet Smith: Really?
- Benjamin Hoffman: Witty and informative. You tell me volumes about Tom's mother in one simple sentence.
- Miss Janet Smith: How will I ever look Tom in the face again?
- Benjamin Hoffman: With guilt, apprehension, remembering the unspeakable - me.
- Benjamin Hoffman: Miss Smith. It's not only homosexuals who don't like women. Hardy anybody likes them.
- Miss Janet Smith: What you're doing to me is atrocious. It's the filthiest thing I've ever heard of.
- Benjamin Hoffman: Yes, I am filthy, yes, but there's no escaping one's fate.
- Benjamin Hoffman: There are two people in all of us - the child in the snapshot and the monster the child grows into.
- Miss Janet Smith: What's wrong with the old place?
- Benjamin Hoffman: Oh, well, you know - treacheries, miseries, failure, despair.
- Benjamin Hoffman: Night thoughts, Saturday, October the 3rd. Every girl is a flower garden with a compost heap at the bottom. And many a noble man has had to drown his dwarf wife in a zinc bath or strangle an idiot girl on a muddy common in order to draw attention to himself. Reality betrays us all.
- Benjamin Hoffman: Reality betrays us, Ms Smith!
- Benjamin Hoffman: Miss Smith?... Please make yourself look as though you want to be fertilized.
- [she is stunned]
- Benjamin Hoffman: What a charming silence you make, Miss Smith.
- Benjamin Hoffman: Come in, Miss Smith.
- [she hesitates at the doorway]
- Benjamin Hoffman: Don't weaken, Miss Smith.
- Miss Janet Smith: [to Hoffman, out of his hearing range] I should've told Tom... and let him kill you!
- Benjamin Hoffman: Can you scramble eggs?
- Miss Janet Smith: Yes.
- Benjamin Hoffman: Your accomplishments never cease to amaze me, Miss Smith.
- Benjamin Hoffman: [Hoffman and Miss Smith are at the piano] And I'll play down here, you play up there - that'll be a duet, or instant cacophony.
- Miss Janet Smith: There's something I want to ask you.
- Benjamin Hoffman: What is it you want to ask me?
- Miss Janet Smith: Can I give up going to work?
- Benjamin Hoffman: ...Yes.
- Miss Janet Smith: And can I have piano lessons?
- Benjamin Hoffman: Yes.
- Miss Janet Smith: From a real teacher?
- Benjamin Hoffman: Yes.
- Miss Janet Smith: And can I choose the things for the new kitchen?
- Benjamin Hoffman: Yes.
- Miss Janet Smith: And... and can I -
- Benjamin Hoffman: - Yes, anything!
- Miss Janet Smith: Are you hungry?
- Benjamin Hoffman: Women are always hungry for something. Fallopian tubes with teeth.
- Benjamin Hoffman: Girls with vain faces and pert airs and graces, would have you suppose that under their clothes, there was more than a tube and some lumps.
- Benjamin Hoffman: Once I knew a pretty girl, I loved her as my wife, but I put my hands about her neck, and relieved her... of her life.
- Miss Janet Smith: Why don't you want me to like you?
- Benjamin Hoffman: Why don't you stop staring me in the face with your doomed youth?