"I like women with big asses. Why do brothers drive Cadillacs? Cause you can't get all that ass in a Volkswagen. The first thing they be sayin', "Kiss my ass." Some ugly women in here, too, tonight. How you doin'? I didn't - when I said ugly, I was lookin' at your ass."

"There's some good-lookin' women in here and some good-lookin' fellas. How you doin', sir? I'm a trisexual. I'll try your little ass tonight."

"I'm from Mississippi and I love it! I like bein' country. I ain't lyin'. Ain't nothin' like a good country lady. Yeah, a girl the other day, I was messin' around with her breast. She got hot. She said, "Oh, wouldn't you like something to go with this good ol' breast milk?" I said, "A good piece of cornbread would go just fine.""

"Ugly woman easy to get along with. They don't want no trouble. You can tell an ugly woman anything, can't you? Hey, bitch, I'm going to the moon. I'll be back in a couple of days. "Well, you be careful. I don't want nothin' to happen to you now, cause you know I - cause I love you. Oh, I love you. Please don't call me a bitch in front of the kids." All right, whore, I'll be back in a couple of days. Goddamn."

"You always avoid direct eye contact, you know that? Are you afraid of something? Are you afraid that I might see the real you? Huh? Answer me. Come on, answer me."

"Everybody's a teacher. People can teach you two things, what to do and what not to do."

"Because mo better makes it mo better."

"I want more money. Okay? I'm not happy. When I'm not happy, I don't play good. When I don't play good, the music doesn't sound good. If the music doesn't sound good, nobody comes. We all lose our money."

"I may have been born yesterday, but I stayed up all night."

"Joan Blondell - Sarah Goode"

"Ben Gazzara - Manny Victor"

"Gena Rowlands - Myrtle Gordon"

"Bobby: I've seen a lot of drunks in my day, but I never seen anyone as drunk as you and still be able to walk. You're fantastic."

"I thought that small talk was too small, I thought big talk was too pretentious, I thought music was noise, and I thought art was bullshit."

"Lady Rowlands - Melva Drake"

"Laura Johnson - Nancy Stein"

"John Cassavetes - Maurice Aarons"

"Zohra Lampert - Dorothy Victor"

"Paul Stewart - David Samuels"

"And Flequs spoke out of his chinkle chankle and he said "Behold, I give you Equus, my only begotten son.""

"It WAS sexy! That's what you wanted to know, isn't it?"

"Double your pleasure, double your fun with double good double good double mint gum."

"How can I? In an ultimate sense, I cannot know what I do in this place, but I do ultimate things, irreversible things and I, I stand in the dark with a blade in my hand, striking at heads, I need, more desperately than my children need me, a way of seeing in the dark; what way is this? what dark is this? I cannot call it "ordained of God" — I cannot go so far. I will however, pay it so much homage. There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out."

"Why me? Why me? First, account for me."

"Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created. You won't gallop anymore, Alan, the horses will be quite safe. You can save your money each week and change that scooter for a car. You'll spend glorious weekends grooming that. You'll pop round to the betting shops and put fifty pence on a nag, forgetting they ever meant anything more to you than bearers of little profits and little losses. You will, however, be without pain; almost completely without...pain.. and now... for me... it never stops... the voice of Equus, out of the cave."

"Alright, I take it away, what then? He'd feel himself acceptable, what then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, just like plasters stuck on other objects we select? I mean, look at him! My desire might be to make of this boy an ardent husband, a caring citizen, a worshipper of abstract and unifying God; my achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost. I heal the rash on his body, I'll erase the welts cut into his mind by flying manes and when that's done I'll put him on a metal scooter and send him puttering off into the concrete world and he'll never touch hide again. Hopefully he'll feel nothing at his fork but approved flesh, I doubt, however, with much passion!"

"Know that, when Equus leaves — if he leaves at all — it will be with your intestines in his teeth — and I don't stock replacements."

"All right! The normal is the good smile in a child's eyes. There's also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills, like a god. It is the ordinary made beautiful, it is also the average made lethal. Normal is the indispensable murderous God of health and I am his priest."

"Worship all you can see, and more will appear."

"That's what his stare has been saying to me all this time: "At least I galloped — when did you?""

"Forgive me. I'm not making much sense. Let me start properly, in order."

"The thing is, I'm wearing that horse's head myself, all reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clean hoofed onto a new track of being that only I suspect is there. I can't see it, because my educated, average head is being held at the wrong angle. I can't jump, because the bit forbids it and my own basic force - my horsepower, if you like - is too little. The only thing I know for sure is this: A horse's head is finally unknowable to me. Yet I handle childrens' heads, which I presume to be more complicated, at least in the area of my chief concern. In a way, it has nothing to do with this boy - the doubts have been there for years, piling up steadily in this dreary place - it's the extremity of this case that's made them active. I know extremity is the point. All the same, whatever the reasons, these doubts are not just vaguely worrying, but intolerable."

"Afterwards, he says, they always embrace. The animal digs his sweaty brow into his cheek and they stand in the dark for an hour, like a necking couple. And of all nonsensical things, I keep thinking about the horse - not the boy, the horse - and what he might be trying to do. I keep seeing the huge head, kissing him with its chained mouth nudging through the metal, some desire absolutely irrelevant of filling its belly or propagating its own kind. What desire could this be? Not to stay a horse any longer? Not to remain reined up forever in those particular genetic strings? Is it possible, at moments we can't imagine, a horse can add its sufferings together, the non-stop jerks and jabs that are its daily life, and turn them into grief? What use is grief to a horse? You see, I'm lost. What use, I should be asking, are questions like these to an overworked psychiatrist in a provincial hospital? They're worse than useless - they are, in fact, subversive."

"Alan Rickman - Interrogator"

"Madeleine Stowe - Victim"