- Coleman Silk: Granted, she's not my first love. Granted, she's not my great love. But she is sure as hell my last love. Doesn't that count for something?
- Mrs. Silk: You need to be proud of your race.
- Young Coleman Silk: What about me? What about just being proud of being me? It's my life.
- Nathan Zuckerman: [voiceover] 1998 was the summer of sanctimony. After the fall of Communism and before the horrors of terrorism, there was a brief interlude when the nation was preoccupied by cock sucking.
- Faunia Farley: You can't go out there, he's fuckin' crazy.
- Coleman Silk: Yeah, so am I.
- [picks up a baseball bat]
- Nathan Zuckerman: Coleman, every mistake a man can make usually has a sexual accelerator. The things that restore you can also destroy you.
- Psychologist: Did you ever kill anyone when you were in Vietnam, Mr. Farley?
- Lester Farley: Did I kill anyone?
- Psychologist: Um hmm.
- Lester Farley: Isn't that what I was supposed to do when I went to fuckin' Vietnam, fuckin' kill gooks? They said everything goes, so everything went.
- Nelson Primus: How do you know she doesn't want to use you to make up for all that she's lost? Do I represent you in a paternity suit, Coleman? "Give up the girl, Achilles." I took your intro to European lit umpteen years ago as an undergrad. Give her up, and your troubles go away.
- Faunia Farley: [dancing provocatively] You're way too young for me. I need a man much older than you. At least 100. Know anyone in a wheelchair?
- Herb Keble: Coleman Silk and his wife Iris were betray by the moral stupidity of a censorious and coercive community. And I was a part of that community. We all were.
- Young Coleman Silk: [giving eulogy] Cowards die many times before their death; the valiant only taste death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear; seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.
- Young Coleman Silk: So, that's an... What is it? Swedish?
- Steena Paulsson: Close, it's Danish and Icelandic.
- Coleman Silk: You can't make a college without breaking egg heads, and uh, I couldn't write a book called Spooks that didn't sound like the raving of a lunatic.
- [last lines]
- Lester Farley: You know my secret place. You know everything now, don't you Mr. Zuckerman? But you won't tell, will you?
- Nathan Zuckerman: [slowly turns to walk away]
- Lester Farley: Hey, the book. Send me one.
- Nathan Zuckerman: It's in the mail.