- Lucia, the mother: I realize now that I've never had any real interest in anything. I don't mean anything grand. Just the simple, everyday interest my husband takes in his work, or my son in his studies, or Odetta in family life. I've had nothing like that. I don't know how I lived with such emptiness, yet I did. If there was anything at all, some instinctive love of life, it has withering away - like a garden where no one ever goes. Actually, that void was filled with false and wretched values, an appalling jumble of misguided ideas. Now I see: You filled my life with a real and total interest. So by leaving, you're not destroying anything that was there before, except my chaste bourgeois reputation. Who cares about that?
- Paolo, the father: What are you reading?
- The Visitor: [Reading Rimbaud] "He was at his daily tasks and that stroke of goodness would take longer to come around again than a star. The Adorable One who'd appeared without my ever hoping he would has not returned and will never return again."
- Paolo, the father: You must have come here to destroy. The destruction you've caused in me couldn't be more complete. You've simply destroyed the idea I've always had of myself. Now I see absolutely nothing capable of giving me back my identity. What are you suggesting? A scandal tantamount to social suicide - a complete loss of myself? But how can this be for a man accustomed to believing in order, in the future, and above all in ownership?
- Pietro, the son: I no longer even recognize myself. What made me like the others has been destroyed. I was like everyone else, with many faults, perhaps, mine and those of the world around me. You made me different by taking me out of the natural order of things.
- [last lines]
- Emilia, the servant: Don't be afraid. I didn't come her to die but to weep. These are not tears of sorrow. No, they'll be a wellspring, but not a wellspring of suffering. Go on now. Go away.
- Factory Worker: The bourgeoisie will never turn all humanity into bourgeoisie.
- Pietro, the son: We must try to come up with new, unrecognizable techniques resembling nothing that's come before to avoid the childish and the absurd. One must build one's own world that allows no comparisons where previous standards don't apply. The standards too must be new, like the techniques themselves.
- Pietro, the son: No one must realize that the artist is worthless, that he's an abnormal, inferior being, squirming and slithering like a worm to survive. No one must ever witness his lapses into clumsy artlessness. Everything must appear perfect, based on unknown and hence unquestionable rules. Like a madman.
- Interviewer: Even if it gives away its factories, whatever the bourgeoisie does is wrong, correct?
- Factory Worker: I decline to respond.
- [first lines]
- Interviewer: Your boss gave you workers his factory. What do you think of his gesture? Is he still the focus here?
- Factory Worker: Of course.
- Interviewer: Has he thus blocked all chance of a future workers' revolution?
- Factory Worker: Possibly.
- Interviewer: Is his action an isolated case, or part of a general trend today?
- Factory Worker: Part of a general trend, I think.
- Odetta, the daughter: Knowing you has made a normal girl of me. You've shown me the right solution for my life. I didn't know men before. In fact, I was afraid of them. I only loved my father.
- Pietro, the son: The artist is a poor, trembling idiot, a second-rate hack who lives by taking chances and risks, like a disgraced child, his life reduced to the absurd melancholy of one who lives debased by the feeling of something lost forever.
- Paolo, the father: What would become of me if I stripped myself of everything and gave my factory to the workers?
- Woman at party: Who is that boy?