Diane Keaton credited as playing...
Louise Bryant
- Louise Bryant: Would you rather I not smoke during rehearsal?
- Eugene O'Neill: I'd rather you went up in flames than crush out your cigarette during a monologue about birth.
- Louise Bryant: All right, wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You want me to come with you to New York?
- John Reed: Yes.
- Louise Bryant: What as? What as?
- John Reed: What do you mean, what as?
- Louise Bryant: What as? Your girlfriend?
- John Reed: What does that mean?
- Louise Bryant: What as? Your girlfriend, your mistress, your paramour, your concubine?
- John Reed: Why does it have to be as anything?
- Louise Bryant: Because I don't wanna get into some kind of emotional possessive involvement where I'm not able to... I want to know what as.
- John Reed: Well, it's nearly Thanksgiving. Why don't you come as a Turkey?
- John Reed: Freedom, Mrs. Trullinger? I'd like to know what your idea of freedom is. Having your own studio? Walk..
- Louise Bryant: I'd like to see you with your pants off, Mr. Reed.
- Louise Bryant: I bet your mother's glad to see you back in Portland.
- John Reed: My mother's glad when I'm not in jail.
- Louise Bryant: [singing] I don't want to play in your yard, I don't like you anymore, You'll be sorry when you see me, Sliding down our cellar door, You can't holler down our rain barrel, You can't climb our apple tree, I don't want to play in your yard, If you won't be good to me
- Louise Bryant: On the subject of decency, Senator, the Bolsheviks took power with the slogan, "an end to the war." Within six months, they made good their promise to the Russian people. Now, the present President of the United States of America went to this country in 1916, on a "no war" ticket. Within six months, he'd taken us into the war, and 115,000 young Americans didn't come back. If that's how decent, God-fearing Christians behave, give me atheists anytime.
- Louise Bryant: By the way, Senator Overman, in Russia, women have the *vote*, which is more than you can say for this country.
- John Reed: I have to go.
- Louise Bryant: You don't have to go. You want to go. You want to go running all over the world ranting and raving and making resolutions and organizing caucuses. What's the difference between the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party except that you're running one and he's running the other?
- John Reed: I've made a commitment.
- Louise Bryant: To what? To the fine distinction between which half of the left of the left is recognized by Moscow as the real Communist Party in America? To petty political squabbling between humorless and hack politicians just wasting their time on left-wing dogma? To getting the endorsement of a committee in Russia you call the international for your group of 14 intellectual friends in the basement who are supposed to tell the workers of this country what they want, whether they want it or not? Write, Jack. You're not a politician, you're a writer. And your writing has done more for the revolution than 20 years of this infighting can do, and you know it.
- Louise Bryant: Gene, if you'd been to Russia, you'd never be cynical about anything again. You would have seen people transformed. Ordinary people.
- Eugene O'Neill: Louise, something in me tightens when an American intellectual's eyes shine and they start to talk to me about the Russian people.
- Louise Bryant: Wait.
- Eugene O'Neill: Something in me says, "Watch it. A new version of Irish Catholicism is being offered for your faith."
- Louise Bryant: It's not like that.
- Eugene O'Neill: And I wonder why a lovely wife like Louise Reed who's just seen the brave new world is sitting around with a cynical bastard like me instead of trotting all over Russia with her idealistic husband. It's almost worth being converted.
- Paul Trullinger: Louise, have you taken leave of your senses?
- Louise Bryant: Don't be a fool, Paul.
- Paul Trullinger: You think I'm a fool because I object to my wife being displayed naked in front of half the people I know.
- Louise Bryant: Yes. My God, it's a work of art in a gallery. What's the matter with you? You used to call Portland a stuffy provincial coffin for the mind.
- Paul Trullinger: It's stuffy and provincial, but it also happens to be a coffin where I earn a living.
- Louise Bryant: You can take your living and fill up teeth with it, because I can earn my own living. I have my work.
- Paul Trullinger: Oh, you consider a few articles in the 'Oregonian' and the 'Gazette' work? No, I'll tell you what your work is, Louise. That's making yourself the center of attention. It's shocking Louise Trullinger, emancipated woman of Portland.
- Louise Bryant: Look at me. Oh, God! I'm like a wife. I'm like a boring, clinging, miserable little wife.
- Louise Bryant: I don't know what I'm doing here. I don't know what my purpose is.
- John Reed: Well, tell me what you want.
- Louise Bryant: I want to stop needing you!
- Louise Bryant: Jack and I are both perfectly capable of living with our beliefs. But I think someone as romantic as you would be destroyed by them. And I don't want that to happen. It would upset Jack too much.
- Louise Bryant: He has the freedom to do the things that he wants to and so do I. And I think anyone who's afraid of that kind of freedom is really only afraid of his own emptiness.
- Eugene O'Neill: Are you making this up as you go along?