- 'Ma' Kate Barker: [opens door and walks into boys' room, where Fred and Kevin are lying in bed together] I don't wanna sleep alone tonight.
- Fred Barker: Ma, I can't.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: Freddie, I don't want to cuddle with you tonight, baby. Kevin, I want you.
- Kevin Dirkman: Well, we're all feeling kinda weird tonight, Ma.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: ...Kevin, I've been promising myself you for a long time, and I want you tonight
- Kevin Dirkman: Well, honey, I'm ready.
- [rolls over Freddie, rubbing him sexually as he climbs out of bed. In a subsequent masochistic ecstasy, Fredde burns himself with his cigar]
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: It's supposed to be a free country Mona. But unless you're rich, you ain't free and you know that. So I aim to be freer than the rest of the people.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: [giving Freddie a bath] Oh, Freddie, stop being a baby! Hot water never did hurt your vital parts.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: Hello, Sheriff. Talk! Come on! Come on!
- Sheriff: Want me to talk to you with the boys here? All of them?
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: Sure, unless you're scared of my boys, Sheriff. Herman, give me that soap over there. And if you're scared of them, Sheriff, then I think I would keep my mouth shut if I was you.
- Sheriff: Wanna tell your Ma what you did to the Turner girl? Herman? Lloyd? Wanna tell your Ma before Mrs. Turner finds a man with a shotgun to come up here and blow your heads off?
- Young Kate: Gonna have me some boys. And there wasn't any one of them who wouldn't kill for me and didn't kill for me. Or me for them. That's what you call family.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: I told you and I told you and I told you! You're not to curse in my house! What does that bastard want over here?
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: You're gonna find me. You're gonna find me someday in a palace. And if you don't find me in a palace, George, you ain't gonna find me. And when you find me and the boys in that palace, you come in through the kitchen door. And you remember, wipe your feet.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: Come on, boys. Come on. Get moving. We're going. If the damn deputies left my boys alone, they'd be good. They'd be the best.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: You're a good man. You made good sons. You've got all the equipment; but, you know, you never could make a decent living. You never did mount me proper. I guess your heart wasn't in it.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: George did everything the way he was supposed to do it. He was a born loser, and I ain't! *And* you boys ain't. You gotta fight the bastards always, boys. You gotta remember you gotta fight 'em.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: She's white trash, and probably filthy with disease, like all the other gals in this town! You understand? A smart boy, a smart boy stays with his equals! You understand that? The trouble is - my boys - my boys ain't got no equals in Joplin, Missouri.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: We were all happy when Lindy made it to Paris. I like a man who took things in his own hands. My Herman was a lot like that.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: You know, some people even tried to put through an anti-lynching bill in Congress? But a lot of folks went to Washington to help defeat it. Anyway, my boys and me were never much for politics.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: Herman, tonight you'll sleep with Ma. You'll sleep with Ma. She'll keep away all the dreams.
- Herman Barker: I didn't mean to kill him, Ma.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: I know that you didn't, baby. I know that. In this world we can't always do what we wanna do, Herman. We can't always have what we wanna have. But, baby, we got each other.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: We listened to Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson and put a little something extra in the plate at church. I knew if God got his, he'd see to it that we got ours.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: The world was sure changing from when I was a little gal. Women was showing their bodies in public, smoking, doing God knows what else. I'm sure glad I didn't raise me any girls. Who knows how they'd have turned out?
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: Now the trouble with Jesus H. Christ, Lloyd - the trouble with our Lord was that he didn't have no smart, slick lawyer.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: They did this to my Herman. They did this to my little Freddie.
- Arthur Barker: Oh, hell, Ma, they just got caught.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: Don't curse in my house. John Wilkes Booth just got caught. Jesus H. Christ just got caught! You with all your book learning. I'm not Mary, mother of God, so I'm gonna see that they get sprung.
- Fred Barker: Ma taught us how to walk a back. Ain't no Barker boy can't take out any pain you got.
- Kevin Dirkman: Did your mom walk your back a lot?
- Fred Barker: Yeah. Ozark massage, she calls it. Like when you're nervous before a big job, Ma will walk your back and sing. She sings: "What an Army of Boys we'd have if we'd ever draft the girls."
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: You're different. You're a friend of Freddie. Freddie likes you and I'm aiming to pleasure myself with you.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: Ladies, I want you to understand something. We is not sex perverts, you understand? I undressed you 'cause I don't want you running around too fast looking for help.
- Arthur Barker: Herman, look, do I get her or don't I?
- Herman Barker: Now you do. But when I marry Mona, and I'm gonna marry her, nobody touches her. You understand?
- Rembrandt: You must be drunk.
- Lloyd Barker: Oh, no. No, ma'am, no. No, I'm high. I'm high. Yeah. I take lots of dope.
- Rembrandt: Oh, come on.
- Lloyd Barker: Nope.
- Lloyd Barker: Mona, don't you feel like a silly ass?
- Mona Gibson: You mean, like, who do I gotta screw to get out of this happy, happy time? Like Ma says: "Another day, another dollar".
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: Herman, I got 300,000 bucks all set up for us just to take. Just to take it. Then your dumbbell of a brother, he brings that silly goon of a girl up here.
- Herman Barker: She ain't no goon, Ma. Lloyd's the goon.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: We gotta kill her, baby. We gotta. Herman, we gotta. We gotta drown her and drop the body in that bottomless lake.
- Herman Barker: We ought to dump Lloyd's body in that bottomless lake, Ma.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: That's immoral. That's beneath my contempt. Lloyd is your brother.
- Herman Barker: So? Let Mona kill him for us. That way we'll keep it all outside the family. Scrub my back, Ma.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: Lloyd, you don't remember, son? Now, I told you and I told you. I told you that up here, we're not the Barkers. We are the decent, respectable, law-abiding Hunters of Bearskin Lake. You don't remember?
- Lloyd Barker: I know I forgot, Ma. But, she was just so cute, I had to take a shot at her.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: Alright. You just keep this pretty little gal here and you don't dare untie those knots. Maybe sometime we'll all have a shot at her.
- Lloyd Barker: I'm not people, see? None of us Barkers is people. Oh, I shouldn't have told you we was Barkers. Do you know what Barkers are? Huh? Huh?
- Rembrandt: I wanna go swimming now. Let's go swimming.
- Lloyd Barker: What are Barkers?
- Rembrandt: Dogs?
- Lloyd Barker: Dogs?
- Rembrandt: Yes.
- Lloyd Barker: Dogs. That's right, "dog." Yeah, dogs do it. And dog eats dog.
- Sam Pendlebury: How do you know he called the cops?
- Herman Barker: We know, buddy. We know.
- Sam Pendlebury: My name is not Buddy!
- Herman Barker: What are you, a wise guy?
- Sam Pendlebury: My name isn't Buddy.
- Herman Barker: Jesus! I could put a bullet through your brain.
- Sam Pendlebury: That still wouldn't make my name Buddy, sonny boy.
- Herman Barker: You're right out of your mind, ain't you?
- Sam Pendlebury: I don't make my living the way you do, if that's what you mean, but either way, my name is Samuel Adams Pendlebury. But since you've seen fit to place me in fairly intimate circumstances, you have my permission to call me Sam. But not buddy.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: Memphis is crawling with those lousy G-Men. Somebody must have called the damn President.
- Mona Gibson: That's a really swell signal. Who thought of that really swell signal?
- Herman Barker: Ma did.
- Mona Gibson: Peachy keen.
- Sam Pendlebury: I don't like for ladies to swear. It's not right. Some things better left to men. Now, you should try to control yourself.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: Don't you get so damn uppity with me, Samuel Pendlebury. I know what all you proper bastards really think. You wish you could be more like us. But you're scared of your neighbors and you ain't got the guts. So you buy all those newspapers and you just spend your time reading about us, and you turn on your radios and you listen about us. Sam, you just got it all bass-ackwards. We're important people in this country now. I bet I'd have more fan mail than Eleanor Roosevelt if they could find us, and I'm prettier than she is. God bless her all the same.
- Sam Pendlebury: How could I make love to you, tied up like this?
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: Supposing you just had on those goggles, and - and you could imagine I was anybody, even your lily-sweet wife. And you could do whatever you wanted to?
- Sam Pendlebury: Supposing, though, I was to hold you down, rip these goggles off, and gag you and tie you, make my escape?
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: And supposing I had my boys sitting over there with a machine gun, you just so much as reach for those goggles and they'd blow your brains out?
- Sam Pendlebury: That'd be one sorry way to make love, wouldn't you say that?
- Mona Gibson: If we get the money, you gonna marry me?
- Herman Barker: Sure I'm gonna marry you, Mona.
- Mona Gibson: We gonna live with your Mama?
- Herman Barker: Ma's the boss.
- Mona Gibson: Peachy keen.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: Sam, would you make love with me?
- Sam Pendlebury: Three weeks is a long time, but I'm a married man.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: Come on. We being outside the law, as you would say, and us being gangsters - we got certain advantages. We don't have to pay no mind to those respectable, nice people rules.
- Sam Pendlebury: You are a strange pack of young men. And if I were your father, I'd take each one of you boys across my knee and I'd wail the living daylights out of you.
- Herman Barker: You're an old lady, Mama. You just can't go beating up on full-grown men like they was little babies. Just ain't ladylike.
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: Lloyd, listen to your Mama. Listen. That - that little girl - that little girl was no good for you. Your Mama's good for you, Lloyd. When you're sick, your Mama's good for you. Lloyd! Lloyd. Lloyd?
- 'Ma' Kate Barker: [singing] Poor butterfly, 'Neath the blossoms waiting, Poor butterfly, For she loved him so, The moments pass into hours, The hours pass into years...