- Burt Berendsen: Each one of us is given a tapestry, our own opera. This person and this person. Thinking about it... love is not enough. You got to fight to protect kindness. You get attached to people and things. And they might just break your heart... but that's being alive.
- Burt Berendsen: You call your husband "general"?
- Mrs. Dillenbeck: Only on the weekdays.
- Burt Berendsen: What do you call him on weekends?
- Mrs. Dillenbeck: That's a very personal question.
- Burt Berendsen: [Putting pain-killing drops in his eye] My back is killing me. Usually guys like me turn to booze, or drugs, which leads to addiction
- [the eye drops take effect]
- Burt Berendsen: WOW! That's fast.
- Harold Woodman: The place looks the same; smells of mothballs, like your marriage.
- Burt Berendsen: Thanks, pal.
- Harold Woodman: What are friends for, if not honesty?
- Burt Berendsen: She was brilliant and nuts, but she was our kind of nuts. And so the pact now had three.
- Harold Woodman: I just wanna see you happy. Dead man makes you realize time is short and love is real, if you know what it is.
- Burt Berendsen: I stayed in Amsterdam for a while, because it was glorious there. He was steady and strong. She was bold and luminous. It was what the French called a coup de foudre. Love at first sight.
- Valerie Voze: Because the dream repeats itself, since it forgets itself. That's why it repeats itself. This is the good part. But the bad part will come again one day, but for now, this is the good part. In Amsterdam.
- Detective Lem Getweiler: You know why I'm here Burt. You and Woodman fled the scene after you pushed the Meekins woman under a truck.
- Burt Berendsen: Why would you possibly think that was us?
- Detective Lem Getweiler: Well there's not too many people that fit the description of a doctor looking for his eye on the ground with his black attorney.
- Burt Berendsen: I've done two autopsies my whole life, one to prove I didn't leave a clamp on someone's small intestine and the other to remove a clamp I *did* leave on someone's small intestine.
- Burt Berendsen: Now we know you're good with small intestines, Burt. Thank you.
- Henry Norcross: Lots of things overlap, Berendsen. The whole world overlaps in its most treacherous way if you pay attention.
- Paul Canterbury: We make the finest prosthetic glass, industrial glass, top secret glass, military glass, every kind of glass except window glass. Unless, of course, it's bulletproof.
- Burt Berendsen: At least you found love, even if you can't get it. I've never been lucky enough to even know what the hell it is.
- Irma St. Clair: Harold says you deserve a better circumstance, but you allowed yourself to be corrupted. He says you followed the wrong God home.
- Burt Berendsen: What? Corrupted? Followed the wrong God home? Why doesn't he say that to me? What does that even mean?
- Irma St. Clair: I don't know. Maybe you spend enthusiasms and urgencies you didn't know you were wasting until it was too late. You ended up without a chair by the time the music ends, even in your own home.
- [first lines]
- Burt Berendsen: [narrating] I was working in my office on 138th Street. Mostly fixing up banged-up guys, like myself, from the Great War. All from injuries the world was happy to forget. Fixing faces, lifting spirits, singing songs. I left my eye in France.
- [an eyeball plunks into a glass of water]
- Burt Berendsen: [narrating] You want for your heart and for your people to follow the right God home.