- Nathan Bronfman: What is love anyway? From my new vantage point, I realize that love is nothing more than a messy conglomeration of need, desperation, fear of death and insecurity about penis size.
- Puff: Words are evil. Are they not evil, these words we use? Hmm? Does anyone know the definition of simultagnosia? I meant to look it up before Lila saved me.
- Nathan Bronfman: The inability to perceive elements as a component of a whole.
- Puff: Thank you, thank you. My pleasure. Don't mention it. Good to see you again. Stop!
- Puff: Mother...
- Puff's Mother: Yes, Derek?
- Puff: It's a pleasure to meet you mother, but I'm an ape, like dad was, and I have to go back into the woods now... forever.
- Louise: I fall in love with a man - his mind, period.
- Lila Jute: There's a limit.
- Louise: No, period. End of sentence. End of paragraph. Close the book, we're done. Give me a man with intellect... I could care less about the packaging. You don't fuck the packaging.
- Lila Jute: Yeah you do.
- Louise: You fuck the mind, Lila, you fuck the mind. Period. Close the book, end the sentence, close the whatever.
- Nathan's Father: A single chromosome separates us. Do you know what truly separates us?
- Young Nathan: What papa, what?
- Nathan's Father: Civilization. Without it, we might as well be living in pens, throwing our feces. Masturbating in public. Sniffing the red swollen female rump.
- Nathan's Mother: [interrupting] Your adopted father and I whisked you away from the life that most certainly would have been one of degradation, alcoholism... Your part of the bargain is to never wallow in the filth of instinct. Any dumb animal can do that.
- Nathan Bronfman: Remember, when in doubt, don't ever do what you really want to do.
- Lila Jute: That's the key.
- Puff: [...] There is indeed a Paradise Lost. Human beings have become so enamored of their intellectual prowess that they forgot to look to the Earth as a teacher. This is hubris, my friends!
- [first lines]
- Lila Jute: I'm *not* sorry.
- Puff: I *am* sorry.
- Nathan Bronfman: I don't even know what sorry means anymore.
- Gabrielle: You must choose. It is like that movie "Sofie's Choice" only it is Nathan's choice. Do you know that movie, "Sofie's Choice"? It is like that. Only it is this.