"You say it, too. And don't give me none of this 'I don't like this place. I'm tired of it.' This place is too much inside your blood. You can't get rid of it. And it can't get rid of you."
Philomena says this to her sister Pelajia who desires to leave the reserve. She insists that that would be impossible, reminding Pelajia that the reserve is a huge part of who she is.
"All us Wasy women. We'll march up the hill, burn the church hall down, scare the priest to death, and then we'll march all the way to Espanola, where the bingos are bigger and better..."
Annie is saying this because she wants the town to host bigger pot bingos, as the winnings have dwindled to nearly nothing recently. She wants to make a stand and go for the big money in Espanola, a bigger city nearby.
"Not Dictionary. Dadzinanare. Henry Dadzinanare. The man who made me learn to fight back. Never let a man raise one dick hair against me since."
Emily tells the women what her real last name is and that it belongs to a man who beat her daily. She learned to fight back, and she won't allow it to happen ever again. This line shows that Emily is very tough and has had to face hardships in the past.
"I'm gonna put that old chief to shame and build me a nice paved road right here in front of my house. Jet black. Shiny. Make my lawn look real nice."
Pelajia says this to Philomena in the first scene of the play, describing how she would change the reserve for the better by paving the roads. Pelajia thinks that modern infrastructure would cure many of the reserve's ills.
"Imagine. And all from one father. Anyway. Who will take care of them after you...ahem...I mean...when you go to the hospital?"
Veronique says this to Marie-Adele. It refers to the fact that Marie-Adele has 14 children, and also clues us in to the fact that Marie-Adele is ill. Veronique is rather rude about this last point, implying that Marie-Adele is facing the possibility of death.
"A parcel from my daughter, Ellen, who lives with this white guy in Sudbury..."
Annie loves to brag about her daughter, whose boyfriend is white, and it becomes a running joke among the women that she cannot mention her daughter without saying that she has a white boyfriend.
"When I win THE BIGGEST BINGO IN THE WORLD, I'm gonna buy me an island. In the North Channel, right smack-dab in the middle—eem-shak min-stik—the most beautiful island in the world."
Each of the women take turns talking about what they will buy with the winnings from THE BIGGEST BINGO IN THE WORLD. This is Marie-Adele's dream purchase, an island of her own.
"I loved her like no man's ever loved a woman. But she's gone. I never wanna go back to San Francisco. No way, man."
Emily tells the story of her lover in San Francisco, who killed herself in front of her. Emily carries the pain of that loss; it is what drove her to return to the reserve, and it is why she never wants to leave.
"Are you ready? Then let the game begin!"
The Bingo Master says this to signal the beginning of the bingo game in Toronto. This whole sequence is somewhat surreal, somewhere between realism and dreamlike reverie.
"Large shining porcelain tiles in hippity-hoppity squares of black and white...so clean you can see your own face, like in a mirror, when you lean over to look into them."
This is the beginning of the monologue that ends the play, delivered by Philomena. She describes the new toilet bowl that she bought with her winnings from bingo. She is the only one to have won at bingo, $600, and she spent it on a very nice toilet bowl.
