"I just want to get everything over with"
Daddy says this early in the play, as he and Mommy wait for their visitors. His words suggest that he wants the visitors to arrive so they can finish with their visit faster. Daddy is portrayed here as being uninvolved, uninterested in the life around him and as wanting to have things happen to him and decisions made for him. He wants to get it over with.
"What a masculine Daddy! Isn’t he a masculine Daddy?"
Daddy is portrayed as being anything but masculine in the play. He is controlled by his wife who lets him believe that he is masculine. Instead, he is a sap, who was taken advantage of by Mommy. Even Grandma points out the fact that Daddy was fooled by Mommy, who married him for his money and not because she loved him. Thus, the general impression is that Daddy had little to no control over his life. He just waits for things to happen to him and is more of a spectator than an active participant. In order to manipulate and control him, Mommy makes a show of how "masculine" she thinks he is, even though this is not the case.
"When you get old, you can’t talk to people because they snap at you. That’s why you become deaf, so you won’t be able to hear people talking to you that way. That’s why old people die, eventually. People talk to them that way."
Words have a great power, and this power is one of the main themes in the play. It is Grandma's rather unusual opinion that people age not because their bodies are getting older, but because they are treated like old people. A person doesn't go deaf because of hearing loss, she suggests. Rather, they go deaf so that they can get some relief from the condescending and demeaning tone with which people typically talk to the elderly. This quote highlights just how powerful words can be and how they can affect a person.
"Middle-aged people think they can do anything, but the truth is that middle-aged people can't do most things as well as they used to. Middle-aged people think they're special because they're like everybody else. We live in the age of deformity. You see? Rhythm and content. You'll learn."
Grandma says this to Mommy immediately after Mommy makes a cutting statement about old people. Mommy is pleased with herself because she thinks she has finally figured out how to be as cutting and mean as Grandma. In response, Grandma says this about Mommy's generation, middle-aged people. At the end, she frames her insult as a kind of lesson, urging Mommy that she needs to have rhythm and content if she wants to properly insult someone.
"I have a right to live off of you because I married you."
Mommy says this to Daddy as a way of reminding him that she deserves to live with and off him. She frames their relationship explicitly as one of exchange, rather than one based in love. She also compares herself to her mother, Grandma, who is living with them, but whom they are not obligated to take care of. While Mommy is protected legally by her marriage to Daddy, Grandma is a charity case. This quote shows that Mommy thinks in a mercenary and cut-and-dry way.
"But old people don't go anywhere; they're either taken places, or put places."
Even Mrs. Barker, the outsider in the play, shares Mommy and Daddy's prejudice against old people. She speaks in sweeping generalities about what older people are capable of, and expresses disbelief when Grandma suggests that she has even a hint of mobility. In her eyes, old people have no agency or power. Rather, they have to be taken places or presided over like children.
"I no longer have the capacity to feel anything. I have no emotions. I have been drained, torn asunder....disemboweled. I have, now, only my person....my body, my face. I use what I have....I let people love me....I accept the syntax around me, for while I know I cannot relate....I know I must be related to. I let people love me....I let people touch me.....I let them draw pleasure from my groin....from my presence....from the fact of me....but, that is all it comes to."
For all his beauty and apparent wholesomeness, the Young Man who wanders into Mommy and Daddy's apartment is a lost soul, and knows himself to be "incomplete." He describes this feeling to Grandma in the above quote, explaining that while he is present to stir feelings in other people, he has no feelings himself. People love him, have sex with him, enjoy being around him, but he is left cold by it all, and remains an empty shell. He knows that this numbness has something to do with the loss of his twin.
“Well, I guess that just about wraps it up. I mean, for better or worse, this is a comedy, and I don’t think we’d better go any further. No, definitely not. So, let’s leave things as they are right now. . . . while everybody’s happy . . . while everybody’s got what he wants . . . or everybody’s got what he thinks he wants. Good night, dears”
In the final lines of the play, Grandma addresses the audience. The play has ended with Grandma leaving the apartment and coming to the edge of the stage to watch the action as a kind of intermediary between the actors and the audience. After the Young Man decides to stay with Mommy and Daddy, Grandma turns to the audience and says this line, telling them that the play is a comedy because it will not take any tragic turns. Rather, it will stay in a lighthearted mood, with everyone getting what they want, or at least what they think they want. This line is both affectionate and haunting. It is as though Grandma knows about the wicked subtext and all of the scary goings-on in the play, and can see the tragic future that will come about, but is going to spare the audience the heartbreak, and so has decided to end the play early.
"I don't know what can be keeping them."
This is the first line of the play. Mommy says it to Daddy as they sit in the armchairs waiting for the arrival of their guests. We do not really know who they're talking about (and neither, it turns out, do they), but it sets the stakes for the entire play, in that we know that at some point someone from the outside world will arrive at Mommy and Daddy's apartment. It builds a certain amount of vague suspense.
Grandma: You ought to be in the movies, boy.
Young Man: I know.
When the Young Man first comes into the apartment, Grandma is struck by how handsome he is, and comments on it by suggesting that he should be in the movies. She is obviously taken by his charming appearance. We do not know much about the Young Man, but we learn that he knows how attractive he is when he agrees with Grandma that he ought to be in the movies.
