- Sophie: My mother, she's very sick, you know. And I can't do anything. But I think - if only I could have got - that meat for my mother it would make her strong. So I go to the country and er... the peasants were selling ham and I buy it with the black market money and I bring it back. But it's forbidden, you know, because all the meat goes to the Germans. So I sat on the train and I hid it under my skirt, I am pretending that I am pregnant, you know? Oh I was so afraid. I was shaking. And then the German, was in front of the train and he saw me. So he come over and take under my skirt that ham and...
- [pause]
- Sophie: So they sent me Auschwitz.
- Stingo: You were sent to Auschwitz because you stole a ham?
- Sophie: No, I was sent to Auschwitz because they saw that I was afraid.
- Narrator: I was twenty two, and a virgin, and was clasping in my arms at last the goddess of my unending fantasies. My lust was inexhaustible. Sophie's lust was both a plunge into carnal oblivion, and a flight from memory and grief. More than that, I now see it was a frantic attempt to beat back death.
- Sophie: [after having taken a sip of the wine that Nathan has poured for her] Mmm. You know, when you... when you live a good life... like a saint... and then you die, that must be what they make you to drink in paradise.
- [last lines]
- Narrator: And so ended my voyage of discovery in a place as strange as Brooklyn. I let go the rage and sorrow for Sophie and Nathan, and the many others who were but a few of the butchered and betrayed and martyred children of the earth. When I could finally see again, I saw the first rays of daylight reflected in the murky river. This was not Judgement Day, only morning. Morning, excellent and fair.
- [first lines]
- Narrator: It was 1947, two years after the war, when I began my journey to what my father called the Sodom of the north, New York. They called me Stingo, which was the nick name I was known by in those days, if I was called anything at all.
- Stingo: Sophie, I want to understand. I'd like to know the truth.
- Sophie: The truth does not make it easier to understand, you know. I mean, you think that you find out the truth about me, and then you'll understand me. And then you would forgive me for all those... for all my lies.
- Stingo: I promise, I'll never leave you.
- Sophie: You must never promise that. No one, no one should ever promise that. Ah, the truth, ah, the truth, I don't even know what is the truth - after all these lies I have told.
- Sophie: Don't you see? We are dying. I longed desperately to escape, to pack my bags and flee, but I did not.
- Stingo: [groping interrupted] What is going on!
- Leslie Lapidus: You don't understand. I can't go all the way. I've reached a plateau in my analysis. Before I reached this plateau of vocalization, I could never have said any of those words. Those Anglo-Saxon four-letter words that everybody should be able to say, and now I'm completely able to vocalize.
- Stingo: [narrating] Leslie Lapidus could say fuck, but she could not do it.
- Nathan Landau: [about Sophie] When I first met this one here, she was a rag and a bone and a hank of hair. And that was a whole year-and-a-half after the Russians had liberated the camp she was in.
- Sophie: Yeah umm it looked like something that the... the scares the birds... you know... what is that... umm scur... scrul... I had scurbutt!
- Nathan Landau: [to Stingo] No, no, no she means scurvy.
- Sophie: Yeah...
- Nathan Landau: And typhus, and anemia and scarlet fever...
- Sophie: Yeah...
- Nathan Landau: Was fucking miracle that she emerged from that camp alive.
- Sophie: Right.
- Sophie: So, we'll go to that farm tomorrow. But please, Stingo, don't talk about marriage and children. It's enough that we'll go down there on that farm to live... for a while.
- Stingo: I let go the rage and sorrow for Sophie and Nathan... and for the many others who were but a few of the butchered and betrayed and martyred children of the Earth. When I could finally see again, I saw the first rays of daylight reflected in the murky river. This was not judgment day. Only morning; morning, excellent and fair.
- Narrator: [narrating] How could I have failed to have the most helpless crush on such a generous mind and life-enlarging mentor. Nathan was utterly, fatally glamorous
- Nathan Landau: This toast is in honor of my disassociation of you two creeps. Disassociation from you, coony captive cunt of King's county. And you, the dreary dregs of Dixie.
- Nathan Landau: On this bridge on which so many great Americans writers stood and reached out for words to give America its voice... looking toward the land that gave them Whitman... from its Eastern edge dreamt his country's future and gave it words... on this span of which Thomas Wolfe and Hart Crane wrote, we welcome Stingo into that pantheon of the Gods... whose words are all we know of immortality. To Stingo!
- Nathan Landau: You spent the whole fucking afternoon with him, or should I say, you spent the whole afternoon fucking him.
- Sophie: I didn't know your mother died.
- Stingo: When I was 12
- Sophie: You loved her very much?
- Stingo: Not enough.
- Sophie: What do you "not enough"? What do you mean?
- Stingo: I mean not enough.
- Sophie: That is what is so terrible about - outliving those people that we love, I mean that's. - that guilt.
- Stingo: Your father?
- Sophie: My father, my mother, my husband.
- Stingo: You were married?
- Stingo: Well, I love you very much, Sophie. And I want to marry you. I want you to live down there on that farm with me. When I write my books there, I want you to help me and I want you to help me raise a family because I love you very, very much. Is it too much to hope that you might love me, too?
- Sophie: Listen, Stingo, I'm beyond 30 years now, you know. What are you going to do with an old Polish lady like me?
- Stingo: Manage. I'll Manage. "Old woman".Don't talk that way. You're always going to be my number one.
- Nathan Landau: I need you like death! Hear me? Like death!
- Sophie: No, Nathan!
- Nathan Landau: Go back to Krakow, baby. Back to Krakow!
- Nathan Landau: Tell me. Tell me, Sophie. The same anti-Semitism for which Poland has gained such a worldwide renown that this similar anti-Semitism guide your own destiny, help you along, protect you in a manner of speaking so you became one of the minuscule, handful of people who lived - while the millions died? Tell me. Tell me why? Explanation, please! Tell me why, old lucky number 11379, tell me, why you inhabit the land of the living? What splendid little tricks and strategems sprang from that lovely head of yours to allow you to breath the clear Polish air? While the multitudes at Auschwitz choked - slowly - on the gas?
- Sophie: No!
- Nathan Landau: Explain!
- Sophie: Stop it!
- Nathan Landau: Explain!
- Nathan Landau: We put the little sweetie here on a massive doses of ferrous sulphate and she began to bloom like a rose. A rose. A rose. A beautiful fucking rose. You're something!
- Sophie: Thank you for making me to bloom like a rose.
- Nathan Landau: Not "to bloom", just "bloom".
- Sophie: This is ridiculous language and there's too many words! The word for "velocity", okay, there's "fast", "quick", "rapid" and they all mean the same thing.
- Nathan Landau: "Swift". "Speedy".
- Stingo: "Hasty".
- Nathan Landau: "Fleet".
- Stingo: "Brisk".
- Nathan Landau: Expeditious".
- Stingo: "Accelerated".
- Nathan Landau: "Winged".
- Sophie: No, no! Stop it! It's ridiculous! Oh, in French it's so easy. You say: "vite". Or in Polish, "szybki" and in Russian, "bystro". It's only in the English it's so complicated!
- Sophie: When I was a little girl, I - I remember, I lay in bed and I hear my mother downstairs playing the piano and the sound of my father's typewriter. I think no child has a more wonderful father and mother. And a more beautiful life.
- Leslie Lapidus: Before I went into analysis, I was completely frigid. Can you imagine? Now all I can do is think about fucking. Wilhelm Reich has turned me into a nympho. I mean, sex on the brain!
- Sophie: I knew that - Christ had turned his face away from me - and that only a Jesus who no longer cared for me could kill those people that I love, but - leave me alive - with my shame.
- Nathan Landau: You wipe out six million Jews - and the world lets them escape. You want to join me in a little lynching party, Southern boy? I expect you might have a lot to teach me there.
- Nathan Landau: However, look on it optimistically. You might be on the verge of a whole new form, the southern comic book.
- Sophie: I see many, many women in your life. Many beautiful women - who adore you and that make all that love with you.
- Sophie: [in broken English] I am six months in the... in here, in U.S., and so I eat more good now than in my life.
- Stingo: I bet your father is a - very interesting man.
- Sophie: Yeah, my father was - a civilized man. That's a word, yeah? "Civilized"?
- Nathan Landau: A very good word.
- Sophie: Yeah? My father was a civilized man living in a uncivilized time. The civilized, they was the first to die.
- Sophie: Good morning, Stingo.
- Stingo: Good morning.
- Sophie: We wanted to make friends and to take you out on this beautiful summer day! We want you to come up and to have breakfast with us.
- Nathan Landau: And then...
- Sophie: Yes?
- Nathan Landau: Coney Island.
- Sophie: Coney Island! Oh boy.
- Leslie Lapidus: Have you ever read D.H. Lawrence, "Lady Chatterley's Lover"?
- Stingo: No.
- Leslie Lapidus: He has the answer. He knows so much about fucking. He says - he says that when you fuck you go to the Dark Gods. Stingo, I really mean it. To fuck is to go to the Dark Gods.
- Stingo: Let's go to the Dark Gods!
- Narrator: Thus, I realized that Leslie and I would be left to frolic in this place alone. My cup ran over. Oh, my cup turned into a spillway flooding across the spotless carpet, out the door, down Pierrepont Street, across all the twilit carnal reaches of Brooklyn. Leslie. A weekend alone with Leslie.
- Sophie: My father. How can I explain how much I loved my father? My father believed that human perfection was possibility. Every night, I pray to God, to forgive me for always making a disappointment to my father. And I pray to him - to make worthy of such a great, good man. I was a grown woman. I was wholly come of age. I was a married woman when I realized that I hate my father beyond all words to tell it.
- Frau Hoess: Imagine, that idiot guard took the new girl into the kitchen without disinfecting her. In the kitchen!
- SS Doctor: Can you imagine? My father asked me what kind of medicine I practice here. What can I tell him? I perform God's work. I select who shall live and who shall die. Is that not God's work?
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