- [first lines]
- Lucrezia Borgia: Mama!
- Vannozza Catanei: I love to hear you call me "mama."
- Lucrezia Borgia: Well, are you not my mother?
- Vannozza Catanei: Not enough. I have acted more like a chalice sister. Once it was like Rosa, the most beautiful woman in Rome. More beautiful than Giulia. These days, I look in the mirror, and I see a face I do not recognize. The time has come to... accept that she is me.
- Ippolito d'Este: Don't those of us who are the wisest age the worst?
- Sigismondo D' Este: There is a bird in Britannia. It's so small, you cannot see it. I have one.
- Alphonso d'Este: Please, forgive my brother. A disease has reached his brain. He is useless.
- Rodrigo Borgia: Or he is the holiest of you all.
- Niccolo da Correggio: Who is to say that if you are gone, Vitelli, or one of the others will not try to *be* you?
- Cesare Borgia: Because no one can be me. Niccolo, you come to tell me things. But you come to read me, as well. Yes? Then read. And you see what is in my heart. Or is there only a pit where others have a soul? Do I love, or merely pretend to?
- [holding up a saw]
- Cesare Borgia: When are my enemies going to attack? They know where I am, here with the high-born men of Faenza, eating off their painted plates.
- Niccolo da Correggio: The cabal is tiny. Each man has his own agenda. Each calculating how to swallow up the spoils. None trusting the others or willing to commit to any hasty course of action. Worse, they fear in failure your vindictiveness.
- Cesare Borgia: Then they have already lost.
- Dealigi: They have. They do not know.
- Cesare Borgia: The more I learn about my generals, the less I respect them.
- Cleofe Marescotti: If you were truly an honorable man, you would surrender.
- Cesare Borgia: I do not take military advice from a woman whose bosom out weighs her brain.
- Cleofe Marescotti: When Astore Manfredi ruled alone, Faenza was never overrun with such horror and doom.
- Astore Manfredi: I love you, Cesare. More than my mortality. Yes, I die gladly, so that Faenza and you will live.
- [they embrace]
- Ippolito d'Este: Angela, why do you never look me in the eye?
- Angela Borgia Lanzol: I hope to have a wedding of my own. You are to be a Cardinal.
- Ippolito d'Este: One day, when you are no longer young and sweet, when your skin slackens and your husband has lost his interest, you will realize that to be *my* mistress is better than being the wife of any other man.
- Aurelio Borgia Matuzzi: If we are to fight like a real family, then let us sit like one. Side by side by side.
- Rodrigo Borgia: We celebrate. Darling girl, this is your chance for happiness, love, peace.
- Lucrezia Borgia: Then why does it not feel so?
- Rodrigo Borgia: Because you're unaccustomed to happiness, love and peace. Joys of life are not a given, you must fight for them.
- Rodrigo Borgia: [to Lucrezia] You go, and do not look back. You do not look back, because you know no matter what you need, whenever you need it, I will alive or dead be there for you. No go. And when I call you name, do not turn to me. Do not.
- Lucrezia Borgia: You are the best of brothers!
- Cesare Borgia: And that is all that I am - all I will ever be to you. We need to begin a new life - informed by our old lives, but invented a new. We must finally and forever say goodbye to the past.
- Lucrezia Borgia: No! I am not ready.
- Cesare Borgia: I'm not either, but the future does not care. I love you, Lucrezia...