- Penelope Stamp: I think you're constipated, in your fucking soul... I think you might have a really big load of grumpy petrified poop up your soul's ass.
- Penelope Stamp: This was a story about a girl who could find infinite beauty in anything, any little thing, and even love the person she was trapped with. And i told myself this story until it became true. Now, did doing this help me escape a wasted life? Or did it blind me so I didn't want to escape it? I don't know, but either way I was the one telling my own story...
- Penelope Stamp: I don't know about "truths." A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells, the less you know.
- Penelope Stamp: I collect hobbies. I see someone doing something I like, and I get books and learn how to do it.
- Bloom: Do you feel cheated?
- Penelope Stamp: The trick to not feeling cheated is to learn how to cheat.
- Stephen: I'm not thrilled they set this in Mexico. There could be legitimate reasons, but Mexico's- and I don't like to simplistically vilify an entire country- but Mexico's a horrible place.
- Bloom: You don't understand what my brother does. He writes his cons the way dead Russians write novels, with thematic arcs and embedded symbolism and shit. And he wrote me as the vulnerable anti-hero. And that's why you think you want to kiss me. It's a con.
- Bloom: How did you find me?
- Penelope Stamp: Bang Bang.
- Bloom: Bang Bang?
- Penelope Stamp: She gave me her cell number.
- Bloom: Bang Bang has a cell phone?
- Penelope Stamp: I know I'm pretending to be a smuggler ba ba ba... BUT what you don't know is that I'm a real smuggler because I tell it like I own it. You know what your problem is? You just gotta stop thinking and just enjoy the ride man.
- Penelope Stamp: I think a little real danger might suit me, so, uh, if you three want to join my smugglers gang, I'll uh, y'know, uh... consider it.
- [first lines]
- Narrator: As far as con man stories go, I think I've heard them all. Of grifters, ropers, faro-fixers; tails drawn long and tall. But if one bears a bookmark in the confidence man's tome, it would be that of Penelope, and of the brothers Bloom.
- [last lines]
- Penelope Stamp: He said to me, there's no such thing as an unwritten life. Just a badly written one.
- Bloom: Oh God.
- Penelope Stamp: I love you Bloom. You know what we're gonna do? We're gonna live. Like we're telling the best story in the whole world.
- Penelope Stamp: Are you ready?
- Bloom: [narrating] And Stephen said something else one. The perfect con is one where everyone involved gets just the thing they wanted.
- Young Stephen: [to Bloom, after finishing their first con] So how's it feel?
- Narrator: In truth, young Bloom won't know for twenty years just how he felt.
- [Beat]
- Narrator: And so, we'll skip ahead now in our story.
- Bloom: I can't wake up next to another stranger, who thinks they know me, or even wants to know me, cause I don't know - who - I'm thirty five years old, and I, I'm useless, I'm crippled, I don't, I've only ever lived life through these roles that aren't me, that are written for me by you.
- Stephen: Tell me what you want.
- Bloom: Why? So you can write me a role in a story where I get it? You're not listening to me. I want a real... thing, I wanna do things how I don't know are gonna work out, a-I, want, a...
- Stephen: You want an unwritten life.
- Narrator: Another home, another main street. Stephen looked around, then summed the burgh up thusly:
- Young Stephen: Bloom, we've hit a one hat town.
- Narrator: One theater. One car wash. One café. One park. One cat. Which, through some mishap, had one leg.
- Bloom: There's actually a nack to this. If you're trying to fast-track to a mark's sympathies, there's nothing quite as effective as having your first conversation be from a hospital bed... they put you in.