- Executive: We sell new machinery. What do you know about drilling equipment for oil fields?
- Rubin Flood: Not a thing.
- Executive: Then why should we hire you?
- Rubin Flood: You chew tobacco, mister?
- Executive: I beg your pardon!
- Rubin Flood: You talk crops and weather? You know who's had a baby lately? You know who goes to church and who don't? Who likes corn liquor and who likes store liquor? Who's a Republican, who's a Democrat?
- Executive: Our methods are a little more modern than that.
- Rubin Flood: Well, I'm telling you that the people out here are farmers, no matter how much oil they got in their land. You want to come out of this territory with a profit? You'd be better off taking that diamond stickpin out of your tie and putting a straw hat on the back of your head and a chaw in your cheek! You're gonna have to hunker down and talk business with a man who's cleaning out his pigsty. That's where a lot of sales are made... and it can't be done in a New York suit!
- Rubin Flood: [To Lottie after he overhears her prejudice comments towards Catholics] Hogwash! Malarky! Horse manure! Woman you oughta get yourself a broom and ride over the housetops! You oughta buy yourself a sheet and poke two holes in it and go around setting fires! Or better still, get yourself a big piece of tape and put it over your mouth because you're too ignorant to live! Lottie sometimes I'm ashamed to be related to you even by marriage!
- Mavis Pruitt: I'm going to tell you something, Mrs. Flood. Every time a door is slammed in a marriage... every time a woman turns her face away because she's tired or unwilling... there's someone waiting. Someone like me.
- [Setting out to find a new job.]
- Rubin Flood: Well, I sold everything else in my time. I guess I can sell myself.
- Rubin Flood: Oh, you always got a excuse. But the plain fact is, a lot of time goes by without our making love. Cora, this is a marriage!
- Cora Flood: There are other things in marriage.
- Rubin Flood: Yeah, but the part I'm talking about is natural! It's normal and it's necessary! God planned it that way, and ain't nobody come up with anything better since Adam and Eve!
- Rubin Flood: Reenie, you're at the beginning of things. These feelings are new to you. You want to get off on the right foot. I'm not talking about the physical side of things, I know you'll always be decent in the way you act. But a man wants to be met by a generous heart in a woman. A open heart. Honey, never be ashamed to say what you feel, and if you come to love a man, let him know it. Let him know all about it.
- Rubin Flood: [about his car] You'd think this thing was an ice cream freezer the the way you have to keep cranking it all the time.
- Sonny Flood: Mama?
- Cora Flood: Sonny. Why are you so afraid of the dark?
- Sonny Flood: I don't know... maybe it's because you can't see what's in front of you. Might be something bad.
- Cora Flood: There's nothing to be afraid of in the dark.