- Schoolteacher: Mrs. Delle Rose. I don't understand how a woman that acts like you could have such a sweet and refined young girl for a daughter.
- Estelle Hohengarten: I have some silk with me I want made into a shirt. There.
- Serafina Delle Rose: Wonderful. Look at that colore. Rosa, huh? Wonderful stuff for a blouse, pajamas.
- Estelle Hohengarten: Oh, I want a man's shirt made out of it.
- Serafina Delle Rose: Silk this color for a - for a shirt for a man?
- Estelle Hohengarten: Well, this man's wild like a gypsy. He likes to feel silk on his skin and wants everything rose-colored.
- Serafina Delle Rose: A woman should not encourage a man to be wild. Never.
- Estelle Hohengarten: If a man's wild, he's hard for a woman to hold. But if he's tame, would a woman want to hold him?
- Serafina Delle Rose: Ah, I like the smell of rose oil in your hair.
- [kiss]
- Serafina Delle Rose: Good. Good.
- Serafina Delle Rose: Where is somebody, please, to carry this package for me on the street? My husband don't allow me to carry big packages like a horse on the street. Please!
- Serafina Delle Rose: Don't speak. Don't speak. Don't speak. Don't speak. Don't speak. Don't speak. Don't speak. Please don't. Don't speak. Please don't. Don't speak. Don't speak. Don't speak, please. Don't speak. Don't speak.
- Serafina Delle Rose: I'm a married woman in business. I don't know nothing about wild men and wild women.
- Rosa Delle Rose: Who is that boy with Pauline Hunter?
- Violetta: That's her brother, Jack. I think he's a dream of a dream.
- Serafina Delle Rose: Go in the house. And wash your face with saltwater and throw the saltwater away. Go in the house! Go in, quick. She's coming! Malocchio.
- Serafina Delle Rose: You don't study no civics tonight.
- Rosa Delle Rose: "Don't study no civics." Why do you talk like you just came over in steerage? This isn't Sicily, Mother, and you are not a baroness. You do sewing. Daddy - Daddy hauled bananas.
- Alvaro Mangiacavallo: Rose?
- Serafina Delle Rose: How do you know my name?
- Alvaro Mangiacavallo: What other name could it be?
- Serafina Delle Rose: Here is the memory of my husband, with a - with a body like a young boy and skin on him smooth and sweet as a yellow rose petal. I'm satisfied to remember, because I had the best, and not the second best, but the only best, a rose.
- Bessie: This blouse can mean the difference between a not-so-good and a very good time in New Orleans. Wait till you see how sexy.
- Rosa Delle Rose: Just think. A week ago Friday I didn't know boys existed. Did you know girls existed before the dance?
- Seaman Jack Hunter: I knew they existed.
- Rosa Delle Rose: Do you remember what you said to me on the dance floor? "Honey, you are dancing too close."
- Seaman Jack Hunter: Well, it was hot in the gym, and the floor was crowded.
- Rosa Delle Rose: When my girlfriend was teaching me how to dance, I asked her, "How do you know which way the boy is going to move?" And she said, "You've got to feel how the boy's going to move with your body." I said, "How do you feel with your body?" And she said, "By pressing up close."
- Bessie: It was a romance too. Not no fly-by-night thing, but a real steady affair that went on for more than a year.
- Flora: Oh, leave her in ignorance. Ignorance is bliss.
- Bessie: He had a rose tattoo on his chest, the stuck-up thing. Estelle was so gone on him that she went down to Bourbon Street and had one put on her too. Yeah, a rose tattoo on her chest, same as the macaroni's.
- Flora: Serafina was laying there in bed with her eyes shut tight and the sheet pulled over her head like a - like a female ostrich.
- Serafina Delle Rose: I'm satisfied to remember the love of a man that was mine, only mine. Never touched by nobody. Nobody but me. Just me.
- Serafina Delle Rose: We are Sicilians. We don't leave the girls with the boys they are not engaged to.
- Seaman Jack Hunter: Mrs. Delle Rose, this is the United States.
- Serafina Delle Rose: I know, but we are Sicilians. We are *not* cold-blooded. My girl is innocent, pure. She is or she was. I would like to know which.
- Rosa Delle Rose: You said to me, "Gee, you're beautiful." I said, "Excuse me," and I ran to the ladies' room. Do you know why? To look at myself in the mirror. For the first time in my life, I felt I was beautiful. You made me feel beautiful when you said I was.
- Seaman Jack Hunter: You are beautiful, Rosa.
- Seaman Jack Hunter: Look, I come home after three months at sea. My sister was going to a high-school dance, and she took me with her. And there I met your daughter.
- Serafina Delle Rose: What did you do?
- Seaman Jack Hunter: At the dance? We danced.
- Serafina Delle Rose: What did you do after that?
- Serafina Delle Rose: Who are you? What are you?
- Rosa Delle Rose: Mama, I just introduced him. His name is Jack Hunter.
- Serafina Delle Rose: Hunter?
- Seaman Jack Hunter: Yes, ma'am, Hunter. Jack Hunter.
- Serafina Delle Rose: What are you hunting, Jack?
- Rosa Delle Rose: Mama. Mama.
- Serafina Delle Rose: What all of them are hunting. To have a good time, and the devils cares who pays for it. I'm sick of men, and I'm sick of women.
- Seaman Jack Hunter: This is the first time I really wanted to.
- Serafina Delle Rose: Wanted to what?
- Seaman Jack Hunter: Make love.
- Serafina Delle Rose: You, a sailor.
- Seaman Jack Hunter: Well, I had opportunities to, but - well, I always thought of my mother.
- Serafina Delle Rose: Huh?
- Serafina Delle Rose: I know what men want. Not to eat ice cream with girls or dance on the floor, no. And boys are the same, only younger. Come here.
- Serafina Delle Rose: I thought he would be ugly. I couldn't speak. I couldn't speak from the moment I saw him till the night after the marriage. Then, I said only, "Oh, love." "Oh, love." I had married a rose. I didn't know I was going to marry a rose. I couldn't speak nothing in English except, "Oh, love." "Oh, *love*." "Oh, love."
- Alvaro Mangiacavallo: When somebody else is crying I gotta cry too. I'm sympathetic. I got too much of a heart.
- Serafina Delle Rose: Don't cry. Why should you cry?
- Alvaro Mangiacavallo: I know. It ain't like a man.
- Serafina Delle Rose: Oh, a man sometimes has to cry like anyone else.
- Alvaro Mangiacavallo: You're very understanding. Sometimes a man has to cry the same as a woman.
- Serafina Delle Rose: A man is not so different from anyone else.
- Father De Leo: I'm gonna talk to you honestly, as your spiritual father. I am shocked. I am shocked at the change in your - in your appearance and behavior since the loss of your husband. Grief is a natural and dignified thing, but like every other emotion, Serafina, it can become excessive. Then - then it becomes a sort of self-indulgence. I knew this was going to happen when you refused to obey the laws of the church and had your husband cremated. I remember you dressed in blue silk. Yes, yes. Like a lady wearing a piece of the weather. You walked tall and proud. Now, you crouch and you shuffle. You - you live and dress like a convict. You have no companions. You're rude to your neighbors. You don't mix with the women who...
- Serafina Delle Rose: They make the life without glory. They make the life without glory. I gave my husband much glory. I was the peasant, but I gave him glory. I came to him with one dress, but I brought him glory. He was a baron and I brought him glory. I brought him glory, glory. Glory. I don't believe that he took this glory I gave him and gave me horns. I don't believe he gave me horns, Father!
- Serafina Delle Rose: You know, my husband, he had this rose tattoo on his chest. One night I woke up with a burning pain on me here. I turned on the light in the bedroom, and I looked in the mirror. On my breast, I saw the rose tattoo of my husband. On me here, his tattoo.
- Serafina Delle Rose: Oh, Madonna Santa. Madonna Santa, my husband's body with a head of a clown. A clown that smells like a goat.
- Alvaro Mangiacavallo: You know, Mangiacavallo means "eat a horse". You know this. But I don't have a horse to eat, not even a chicken.
- Alvaro Mangiacavallo: Oh, I like a lady that laughs with all her heart.
- Serafina Delle Rose: And a lady that cries with her heart?
- Alvaro Mangiacavallo: I like everything a lady does with her heart.
- Alvaro Mangiacavallo: Love and affection is what I got to offer on hot or cold days in this lonely old world. I got nothing else. Mangiacavallo has nothing.
- Serafina Delle Rose: I liked what you say. That bodies decay, but the ashes always stay clean. Immacolato.