- Steiner: Don't be like me. Salvation doesn't lie within four walls. I'm too serious to be a dilettante and too much a dabbler to be a professional. Even the most miserable life is better than a sheltered existence in an organized society where everything is calculated and perfected.
- Marcello Rubini: [to Sylvia] You are everything... everything! You are the first woman on the first day of creation. You are mother, sister, lover, friend, angel, devil, earth, home.
- Steiner: We must get beyond passions, like a great work of art. In such miraculous harmony. We should love each other outside of time... detached.
- Marcello Rubini: [to Emma] A man who agrees to live like this is a finished man, he's nothing but a worm! I don't believe in your aggressive, sticky, maternal love! I don't want it, I have no use for it! This isn't love, it's brutalization!
- Laura: [to Marcello] Stay free, available, like me. Never get married. Never choose. Even in love, it's better to be chosen.
- Poetess at Steiner's Party: [Le tre grandi evasioni -- fume, bere, letto.] The three great escapes -- smoking, drinking, bed.
- Marcello Rubini: I'm wasting time. I won't manage anything anymore. Once I had ambitions, but maybe I'm losing everything. I forgot everything.
- Sylvia: [when a reporter asked her, "How do you sleep, with pajamas or nightgown?"] Neither. I sleep only in 2 drops of French perfume.
- Emma: [to Paparazzo] How can you be this way? It's not possible to be like you! Hyenas! You're worse than hyenas! You don't respect anyone! You make me sick! Cowards!
- Steiner: [to Emma] The day you understand that you love Marcello more than he does, you'll be happy.
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