"Diamond Louie: Down Western Avenue, we was going sixty-five miles an hour...We run smack into a police patrol. you know what I mean? We busted it in half!...Can you imagine bumping into a load of cops? They come rolling out like oranges!...When I come to, I was running down Thirty-fourth Street...The driver got knocked cold...I don't think she's [Bruce's mother] squawking much, you know what I mean?...Say listen, me with a gun on the hip and a kidnapped old lady on my hands, I'm gonna stick around askin' questions from a lot of cops?"

"Mayor: A guy who's done nothing for the last forty years but play pinochle gets elected Governor and right away, he thinks he's a Tarzan."

"Mayor: Do you realize there are two hundred thousand votes at stake? And if Earl Williams don't hang, we're gonna lose 'em?"

"Now you want me to talk...Oh ain't that funny. You wouldn't listen to me before. Not even for a minute. And now you want me to talk...What do ya want to know for? So you can write some more lies, so you can sell some more papers. I'll give you a wonderful story - only this time it'll be true!"

"Dolores Costello - Isabel"

"James Westerfield - Policeman at Accident"

"Gus Schilling - Drug Clerk"

"Don Dillaway - Wilbur Minafer"

"Orson Welles - Narrator"

"Richard Bennett - Maj. Amberson"

"Erskine Sanford - Roger Bronson"

"Ray Collins - Jack"

"Agnes Moorehead - Fanny"

"Tim Holt - George"

"Anne Baxter - Lucy"

"Joseph Cotten - Eugene"

"Orson Welles' Mercury Production of Booth Tarkington's Great Novel"

"From the Man who Made "The Best Picture of 1941""

"Real life screened more daringly than it's ever been before!"

"Most girls are usually pretty fresh. They ought to go to a man's college for about a year. They'd get taught a few things about freshness. Look here, who sent you those flowers you keep making such a fuss over?"

"Anybody that really is anybody ought to be able to do about as they like in their own town, I should think."

"Nobody has a good name in a bad mouth! Nobody has a good name in a silly mouth, either."

"You can't ever tell what will happen at all, can you? Once I stood where we're standing now to say goodbye to a pretty girl. Only, it was in the old station, before this was built. We called it the depot. We knew we wouldn't see each other again for almost a year. I thought I couldn't live through it. She stood there crying. Don't even know where she lives now. If she is living."

"[to George] Ah, life and money both behave like loose quicksilver in a nest of cracks. When they're gone, you can't tell where, or what the devil you did with them... I've always been fond of you, Georgie. I can't say I've always liked ya. But we all spoiled you terribly when you were a boy... There have been times when I thought you ought to be hanged. And just for a last word, there may be somebody else in this town who's always felt about you like that. Fond of you, I mean, no matter how much it seems you ought to be hanged."

"Fanny, I wish you could have seen Georgie's face when he saw Lucy. You know what he said to me when we went into that room? He said, "You must have known my mother wanted you to come here today, so that I could ask you to forgive me." We shook hands. I never noticed before how much like Isabel Georgie looks. You know something, Fanny? I wouldn't tell this to anybody but you. But it seemed to me as if someone else was in that room. And that through me, she brought her boy unto shelter again. And that I'd been true at last, to my true love."

"[in a letter to Isabel] And so we come to this, dear. Will you live your life your way, or George's way? Dear, it breaks my heart for you, but what you have to oppose now is your own selfless and perfect motherhood. Are you strong enough, Isabel? Can you make a fight?"

"I know what your son is to you and it frightens me. Let me explain a little. I don't think he'll change. At twenty-one or twenty-two, so many things appear solid and permanent and terrible. Which forty sees are nothing but disappearing miasma. Forty can't tell twenty about this. Twenty can find out only by getting to be forty."

"George Amberson-Minafer walked home through the strange streets of what seemed to be a strange city. For the town was growing... changing... it was heaving up in the middle, incredibly; it was spreading incredibly. And as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself and darkened its skies. This was the last walk home he was ever to take up National Avenue, to Amberson Edition, and the big old house at the foot of Amberson Boulevard. Tommorow they were to move out. Tomorrow everything would be gone."

"Something had happened, a thing which years ago had been the eagerest hope of many, many good citizens of the town. And now it came at last: George Amberson Minafer had got his comeuppance. He'd got it three times filled and running over. But those who had longed for it were not there to see it. And they never knew it, those who were still living had forgotten all about it, and all about him."

"And now Major Amberson was engaged in the profoundest thinking of his life. And he realized that everything which had worried him or delighted him during this lifetime, all his buying and building and trading and banking, that it was all trifling and waste beside what concerned him now. For the Major knew now that he had to plan how to enter an unknown country where he was not even sure of being recognized as an Amberson."

"In those days, they had time for everything. Time for sleigh rides, and balls, and assemblies, and cotillions, and open house on New Year's, and all-day picnics in the woods, and even that prettiest of all vanished customs: the serenade. Of a summer night, young men would bring an orchestra under a pretty girl's window, and flute, harp, fiddle, cello, cornet, bass viol, would presently release their melodies to the dulcet stars. Against so home-spun a background, the magnificence of the Ambersons was as conspicuous as a brass band at a funeral."

"The magnificence of the Ambersons began in 1873. Their splendor lasted throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city. In that town in those days, all the women who wore silk or velvet knew all the other women who wore silk or velvet and everybody knew everybody else's family horse and carriage. The only public conveyance was the streetcar. A lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window, and the car would halt at once, and wait for her, while she shut the window, put on her hat and coat, went downstairs, found an umbrella, told the "girl" what to have for dinner and came forth from the house. Too slow for us nowadays, because the faster we're carried, the less time we have to spare."

"Lewis L. Russell - Charles St. James"

"Lillian Fontaine - Mrs. Charles St. James"

"Anita Sharp-Bolster - Mrs. Foley, Cleaning Lady"

"Mary Young - Mrs. Deveridge, Birnam's Landlady"

"Frank Faylen - 'Bim' Nolan, Male Nurse"

"Doris Dowling - Gloria"

"Howard Da Silva - Nat, Bartender"

"Phillip Terry - Wick Birnam"

"Jane Wyman - Helen St. James"

"Ray Milland - Don Birnam"