- Lady Torrance: Tell me some more about your self-control.
- Valentine Xavier: Well, they say that a woman can burn a man down, you know? But I can burn a woman down. I'm saying that I could. I'm not saying I would.
- Lady Torrance: What's the matter? Have they tired you out?
- Valentine Xavier: No, I'm not tired.
- Carol Cutrere: Wild things leave skins behind them. They leave clean skins and teeth and white bones. And these are tokens, passed from one to another. So that the fugitive kind can follow their kind.
- Carol Cutrere: Why are you pretendin' not to remember me?
- Valentine Xavier: Well, it's hard to remember somebody you never met.
- Valentine Xavier: There's a kind of bird that don't have any legs so it can't alight on nothing. So it has to spend its whole life on its wings in the air. I seen one, once. It died and fell to earth. And its body was light blue colored. And it was just as tiny as your little finger. And it was so light in the palm of your hand that it didn't weigh more than a feather. And its wings spread out that wide - and you could see right through them. That's why the hawks don't catch them; because, they don't see them. They don't see them way up in that high blue sky near the sun.
- Lady Torrance: What about in gray weather?
- Valentine Xavier: They fly so high. In gray weather, the hawks, they'd get dizzy. See, these little birds don't have no legs at all so they have to live their whole lives on the wing. And they sleep on the wind. That's what they do, they just - they just spread their wings out and go to sleep on the wind. And they only alight on this earth but one time - it's when they die.
- Valentine Xavier: What do you feel?
- Lady Torrance: Your hand.
- Valentine Xavier: That's right. The size of my knuckles and the heat of my palm.
- Lady Torrance: What are you demonstrating now?
- Valentine Xavier: That's how well we know each other. All we know is the skin surface of each other.
- Lady Torrance: Why do you say these things tonight?
- Valentine Xavier: Because nobody ever gets to know anybody. We're, all of us, sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own lonely skins for as long as we live on this earth.
- Carol Cutrere: I used to make stump speeches. Oh, and I wrote letters of protest against the gradual massacre of the colored majority in the county. And you know, when that Willie McCoy thing came along, poor man got sent to the chair, you know. for having improper relations with a white slut. Oh, I made a fuss about that. I put on a potato sack and I set out on foot for the capitol. And you know how far I got? Six miles out of town. I was hooted and jeered at and even spit on every step of the way. And then I got arrested. And you know what for? Lewd vagrancy! Oh, me. That was a long time ago. And I'm not a reformer anymore. I'm just a lewd vagrant. And I'm gonna show 'em. And show 'em all just how lewd, a lewd vagrant can be when she puts her whole heart into it, the way I do mine.
- Carol Cutrere: You hear the dead people talkin'?
- Valentine Xavier: Dead people don't talk.
- Carol Cutrere: Sure they do. They chatter away like birds here on Wisteria Hill. But all they can say is one word - and that word is "live. " Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. That's all they know. That's the only advice they can give. It's simple. It's a very simple instruction.
- Carol Cutrere: [as Xavier and Carol, in her sports car, approach the local cemetery, Wisteria Hills] Pull over here.
- Valentine Xavier: [unaware of where they are] You live around here?
- Carol Cutrere: [slightly incredulous] Nobody lives around here! This is the local bone orchard!
- Carol Cutrere: What are they sayin' about me? That I'm degraded? Is that what you're sayin' about me? That I'm corrupt, degraded? Hmm?
- Valentine Xavier: Why are you so anxious to prove that I know you?
- Carol Cutrere: Cause I'd like to know you better and better.
- Carol Cutrere: You know, they say that if you break the heel of your slipper in the mornin' that means you'll meet the love of your life before dark. Of course, it was almost dark when I broke the heel of my slipper. Do you suppose that means that I'll meet the love of my life before daybreak?
- Carol Cutrere: You take this bone and you leave it on a bare rock in the rain and the sun until every sign of corruption is burned and washed away. And then it will be a good charm.
- Sheriff Jordan Talbot: Who's the boy you got sleepin' down there now?
- Vee Talbot: Mr. Xavier. His car broke down. He's a musician.
- Sheriff Jordan Talbot: Yeah, I'm sick of you makin' a fool of yourself over every stray tramp that wanders into this county.
- [disgustedly]
- Sheriff Jordan Talbot: A musician!
- Carol Cutrere: There are plenty other juke joints on the highway. Mr. Xavier, would you like to go juking? Come on, let's you and me go juke.
- Valentine Xavier: Why do you make such a crazy show of yourself?
- Carol Cutrere: 'Cause I'm an exhibitionist! I want people to know I'm alive. Don't you want people to know you're alive?
- Valentine Xavier: I just want to live. I don't care whether they know I'm alive or not.
- Carol Cutrere: Well, I want to be noticed, and seen, and heard, and felt!
- Valentine Xavier: Get your legs on the other side of the gear shift.
- [Carol spreads her legs, moving only one]
- Valentine Xavier: Both of them.
- Valentine Xavier: She made a mistake about me.
- Lady Torrance: What kind of mistake?
- Valentine Xavier: Well, she thought I had a sign hung on me: "Male at stud."
- Valentine Xavier: You know, my temperature's always a couple of degrees above normal. The same as a dog's. You don't believe me?
- Lady Torrance: I have no reason to doubt you. Believe me. Well, I couldn't hire no stranger with a snakeskin jacket and a guitar. And a temperature as high as a dog's.
- Valentine Xavier: Ma'am, I do all kinds of electrical repairs. I do odd jobs and I need the work real bad.
- Lady Torrance: What's the matter with your guitar? Are you tired of it?
- Valentine Xavier: No, ma'am. That's my life's companion; but, I had to hock it once and I don't want to do that anymore. I need a steady job.
- Lady Torrance: What's all that writing on it?
- Valentine Xavier: Well, that's - all that's - all that's autographs of famous jazz musicians. See this name here? Leadbelly. That was the greatest man that ever lived on 12-string guitar. He played that thing so good, he broke the stone heart of a Texas governor and won himself a pardon out of jail. His name's written in the stars. This one here. Jefferson. Blind Lemon Jefferson.
- Lady Torrance: Is his name written in the stars, too?
- Valentine Xavier: Yeah. His name's written in the stars.
- Lady Torrance: You're a peculiar somebody, all right.
- Valentine Xavier: You know, Lady, there's people bought... and sold in this world like carcasses of hogs... in butcher shops. You might think that there's many... There's many kinds of people in this world. But there's only two kinds: The buyers and the ones that get bought. No, there's another kind.
- Lady Torrance: What kind?
- Valentine Xavier: It's a kind that don't - belong no place at all.
- Lady Torrance: Let's get one thing straight.
- Valentine Xavier: What thing is that?
- Lady Torrance: You don't interest me no more. than the air you stand in. If that's understood, we will have a good working relation. Otherwise, trouble.
- Carol Cutrere: I'd love to hold something the way you hold your guitar. That's the way I'd love to hold something with such tender protection. I'd love to hold you that way. With that same tender protection. 'Cause you hang the moon for me.
- Valentine Xavier: if you ever have any trouble sleeping, I know how to fix that. You see I - I met a lady osteopath one time that taught me how to make little adjustments in the back of the neck and the spine. Give you a sound, natural sleep. Okay?
- Lady Torrance: Back there is the confectionary which will open this spring. It's going to be like the wine garden of my father. You remember the wine garden of my father? You remember those wine drinking nights - when someone loved you better than anyone's loved you since?
- Carol Cutrere: I woke up thinking about you last night in New Orleans. I tried to pour oblivion out of a bottle but it wouldn't pour out. So, finally, I just got in my car and I drove 80 and 90 and 100 miles an hour because I was afraid you'd be gone before I got here.
- Lady Torrance: You sold yourself. I sold myself. You was bought and I was bought. Sold and bought like things in this store!
- Vee Talbot: I tell you, Mr. Xavier, since I took up my paintin', my whole outlook is different. I can't explain it.
- Valentine Xavier: You don't have to explain it, I know what you mean. It's like me when I'm - when I'm playin' my guitar. I guess, when, before you started paintin', it just - it didn't make sense.
- Vee Talbot: What didn't?
- Valentine Xavier: Existence.
- Vee Talbot: No. My existence didn't make sense.
- Sheriff Jordan Talbot: I heard you were good-looking. And sales have been pickin' up since you took over down there, boy.
- Valentine Xavier: Yeah, business has been pretty good.
- Sheriff Jordan Talbot: I bet most of this lively new business comes from women, don't it? The older ones? Older ones are buyers. They got the money, Jordan. They sweat it out of their husbands and - throw it away.
- Sheriff Jordan Talbot: Doggone it, if that ain't the truth.
- Valentine Xavier: [singing] Last night I crossed the river, With a heavy blanket roll, I took nobody with me, Not a soul...
- Sheriff Jordan Talbot: Stand back under that light. I wanna look at you while I run through some photos of men wanted.
- Valentine Xavier: I'm not wanted.
- Sheriff Jordan Talbot: A good-looking boy like you is always wanted.
- Lady Torrance: I was proud then. I had pride that summer they burned the wine garden of my father. And you washed - you washed your hands clean of any connection with a dago bootlegger's daughter.
- Valentine Xavier: How did it happen to burn?
- Lady Torrance: My papa made a mistake. One night, one summer, he sold liquor to Negroes. You heard of the vigilantes?
- Valentine Xavier: Yeah, I heard of 'em.
- Lady Torrance: They took action that summer. They rode out here with gallons of coal oil - and set the whole place on fire. Vines, arbors, fruit trees. The whole sky lit up with it. And all the way across this lake, you could hear my papa calling. Nobody answered the call.
- Sheriff Jordan Talbot: All right, boy, I ain't gonna touch your guitar. I'm gonna tell you something. There's a certain county I know of that's got a big sign that says: "N, don't let the sun go down on you in this county. " And that's all it says. It don't threaten nothing. It just says, "N, don't let the sun go down on you in this county." Well, son. You ain't that n. This ain't that county. But I want you to just imagine that you seen a big sign that said to you: Boy, don't let the sun rise on you in this county. I said rise, not go down. Because it's too close to sunset for you to get packed and move on before that. And I think if you value your safety here you'll simplify my job by not allowing the sun tomorrow to rise on you in this county. Now, you understand, don't you, boy? I hope so. 'Cause I don't like violence.
- Carol Cutrere: Juking? Oh! Well, that's when you get in a car, which is preferably open in any kind of weather. And then you drink a little bit and you drive a little bit, and then you stop and you dance a little bit with a jukebox. And then you drink a little bit more and you drive a little bit more, you stop and you dance a little bit more to another juke box! And then you stop dancing and you just drink and you drive. And then, you stop driving. And you just drink.
- Valentine Xavier: I got myself into a situation here, Lady.
- Lady Torrance: No, you're not fooling me, mister. She's waiting for you outside.
- Valentine Xavier: No.
- Lady Torrance: In her car, yes.
- Valentine Xavier: No...
- Valentine Xavier: I want you to understand.
- Lady Torrance: What?
- Valentine Xavier: I got myself into a situation here that I can't get out of.
- Lady Torrance: Not in a town like this.
- Valentine Xavier: I've been threatened with violence if I stay here through the night.
- Jabe Torrance: Boy, I sure married a live one, didn't I? Didn't I? Sure did marry me a live one. Her daddy, the wop, was just as much of a live one before he burned up. Yeah, he burned up! 'Cause he made a mistake sellin' liquor to ns!