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[On Gail, the woman she thinks her husband has been sleeping with]
Sally: What can I say? She's me, but she's younger.
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[On finding out that her husband, with whom she separated recently, had been cheating on her]
Sally: It was a huge blow to my ego. You know, I thought he loved me, that, uh, that we were experimenting, you know.
Interviewer: But if you had met someone first?
Sally: [smiling] Probably right. Probably would have done the same thing.
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Gabe: Change equals death!
Judy: What kind of bullshit? That's just a bullshit line! Maybe you fool your twenty-year-old students into thinking that's some kind of a, an insight or something, but it means nothing! Change is what life is made of! Change - if you don't change, you don't grow, you just shrivel up!
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Sam: I used to eat red meat every day and then I gave it up and then I had some again recently and I was totally bloated! I mean, like, really bad!
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Sally: Fucking men! Woman gets to be over a certain age, it becomes a different ballgame.
Paul: Oh, no, no -...
Sally: Don't defend your sex! It's true! You're great 'til you start to show your age - then they want a newer model.
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Sally: It's the Second Law of Thermodynamics: sooner or later everything turns to shit. That's my phrasing, not the Encyclopedia Britannica.
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Judy: You use sex to express every emotion except love.
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Man: If astrology were true -...
Sam: It is true! It is totally, totally, totally provable, you know?
Female Party Guest: Provable how? From gypsies?
Sam: Well, it's totally logical, right? You know, why wouldn't the position of the planets have an influence on our personalities?
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Gabe Roth: See, I will always have this penchant for what I call kamikaze women. I call them kamikazes because they, you know they crash their plane, they're self-destructive. But they crash into you, and you die along with them.
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Gabe Roth: I do not flirt!
Judy Roth: Don't tell me you don't flirt because I've seen you do it, at parties, you put on a whole other personality.
Gabe Roth: Oh you're crazy.
Judy Roth: Of course you do. You get all soulful and pretend to want things that you really can't stand.
Gabe Roth: Like what? What are you talking about?
Judy Roth: Like moving to Europe. That's just a flirting technique, you couldn't survive off the island of Manhattan for more than 48 hours.
-
Sally: I thought that I liked what Michael was doing to me, and it felt different from Jack; more gentle. And more exciting. And I thought how different Michael was from Jack. How much deeper his vision of life was. And I thought Michael was a hedgehog and Jack was a fox. And then I thought Judy was a fox and Gabe was a hedgehog. And I thought about all the people I knew, and which were hedgehogs and which were foxes. Al Simon, a friend, was a hedgehog, and his wife Jenny was a hedgehog. And Cindy Salkind was a fox. And Lou Patrino was a hedgehog.
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Rain: I spent five days searching for the perfect word to describe the husband and that's when I came up with "apucious".
Gabe: Apucious. I looked it up in the dictionary but I couldn't find it.
Rain: Yeah, I know. I made it up.
Gabe: Oh, really.
Rain: Yeah. I thought it described him perfectly.
-
Rain: I just think that maybe I... I could've been threatened by certain things in the book.
Gabe: Like what, you know...?
Rain: Um, some of the attitudes towards women and your ideas on life.
Gabe: You told me you love the book.
Rain: I do. I do love it, yeah.
Gabe: What were your criticisms?
Rain: Um, nothing.
Gabe: No, tell me. Tell me what your criticisms were.
Rain: I was a little disappointed, I guess, with, ah, with some of your attitudes.
Gabe: Like what? What attitudes?
[Rain sighs]
Gabe: With what?
Rain: The way your people just casually have affairs like that, that's...
Gabe: Well, the book doesn't condone affairs. You know, I'm exaggerating for comic purposes.
Rain: Yeah, I mean but are our choices really between chronic dissatisfaction and suburban drudgery?
Gabe: No, but, you know, that's how I... I'm deliberately distorting it, you know, 'cause I'm trying to show how hard it is to be married and...
Rain: Well, you have to be careful not to trivialize with things like that.
Gabe: Well, Jesus, I... I hope I haven't.
Rain: Well, the way your... your lead character views women, it's so retrograde. It's so shallow, you know?
Gabe: What are you talking... You told me you... you know, that... you told me it was a great book.
Rain: Yeah, it's wonderful. And I never said great. I said it's brilliant, and it's alive, and... You know, that's not what I'm... We're not arguing about whether it's brilliant or not. I'm, you know... Triumph of the Will was a great movie, but you despise the ideas behind it.
Gabe: What... what are you saying, now? You despise my ideas?
Rain: No, I don't despise them. All right, that... that example was wrong.
[pause]
Rain: OK, isn't it beneath you as a mature thinker, I mean, to allow your lead character to waste so much of this emotional energy obsessing over this psychotic relationship with a woman that you fantasize as powerfully sexual and inspired when, in fact, she was pitifully sick?
Gabe: Look, let's stop this right now because I don't need a lecture on maturity or writing from a 20-year-old twit.
-
[last lines]
Gabe Roth: Can I go? Is this over?
-
Gabe: What happened after the honeymoon? Did desire grow or did familiarity make partners want other lovers? Was the notion of ever-deepening romance a myth along with simultaneous orgasm? The only time Rifkin and his wife experienced one was when they were granted their divorce. Maybe in the end, the idea was not to expect too much out of life.
-
[first lines]
TV Scientist: [on TV] Einstein was then celebrating, uh, the seventieth birthday anniversary and there was a colloquium given for him. And he said, "God doesn't play dice with the universe".
Gabe: No. He just plays hide-and-seek.
-
Gabe: It told him something. How millions of sperm... competed for a single egg, not the other way around. Men would make love with any number of women... even total strangers, while females were selective. They were catering to the demands of one small egg. While males had millions of frantic sperms screaming.: "Let us out, let us out!"
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Rain's Mother: We're tremendous fans of yours, we wish you'd still write those funny short, you know, funny, sad stories that you wrote.
-
Gabe: Boy, I'd hate to be your boyfriend! He must go through hell.
Rain: Well, I'm worth it.
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Sally: Don't not support us!
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Gabe: [to Jack] It's like your I.Q. is suddenly in remission.
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Gabe: [Relating what Rain wrote] Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.
Husbands and Wives Quotes
Extended Reading
