AIC Act 1 Quotes Flashcards
Stage Directions: “Champagne glasses, decanters of
port, cigar box and cigarettes.”
Stage Directions: “The lighting chould be pink and intimate until the
Inspector arrives, and then it should be brighter and harder.”
Stage Directions: “Mr Birling is a ‘heavy-looking,
rather portentous man.’”
Stage Directions: “Mrs Birling is a ‘rather cold woman and
her husband’s social superior’”.
Stage Directions: Sheila is “very pleased with life and
rather excited.”
Stage Directions: Gerald is an “easy well-bred
young man about town.”
Stage Directions: Eric is “not quite at ease, half
shy, half assertive.”
Birling: “Giving us
the port, Eric?”
Mrs Birling: “Arthur, your’re not supposed
to say such things -“
Sheila: [Half serious, half playful] “Except for all last summer,
when you never came near me.”
Mrs Birling: “Now, Sheila, don’t tease him. When you’re married
you’ll realise that men with important work do sometimes have to spend nearly all their time and energy on their business. you’ll have to get used that, just as I had.”
Birling: “You’re just the kind of
son-in-law I always wanted.”
Birling: “Crofts and Birlings…working together -
for lower costs and higher prices.”
Sheila: “You’re
squiffy.”
[Gerald produces
a ring case].
Sheila: “Is it the one you
wanted me to have.”
Birling: “The interest of Capital -
are properly protected.”
Birling: “(the Titanic)… unsinkable,
absolutely unsinkable.”
Gerald: “You seem to be a nice
well-behaved family.”
Birling: “Just let me finish, Eric… I’m talking as a hard headed,
practical man of business.”
Birling: “As if we were all mixed
up together like bees in a hive.”
Birling: “Community and all that nonsense…
a man has to mind his own business and look after himself and his own-and -[we hear the sharp ring of a front door bell].”
Birling: “The way some of these cranks
talk and write now.”
Stage Directions: The Inspector ‘creates at once an impression of
massiveness, solidity and purposefulness.”
Inspector: “Two hours ago a young woman died in the infirmary…
Burnt her inside out, of course.”
Inspector: “A chain
of events.”
Stage Directions: The inspector: ‘[cutting
through massively]’
Birling: About Eva “A good
worker too.”
Birling: About Eva “She’d had a lot
to say - far too much.”
Birling: “They wanted the rates raised…
I refused, of course.”
Birling: “If you don’t come down sharply on some
of these peoiple, they’d soon be asking for the Earth.”
Inspector: “It’s better to ask for the
Earth than to take it.”
Inspector: “It’s my duty
to ask questions.”
Birling: “Well, it’s my duty to
keep the labour costs down.”
Eric: “Why shouldn’t they try for higher wages?
We try for the highest possible prices.”
Gerald: “I know we’d have done the same thing.
Don’t look like that, Sheila.|”
Sheila: “It’s just thyat I can’t help thinking about this girl - destroying herself so horribly -
and I’ve been so happy tonight.”
Sheila: “But these girls aren’t cheap
labour, they’re people.”
Inspector: “It would do us all a bit of good if sometimes we tried to put ourselves
in the place of these young women counting their pennies in their dingy little back bedrooms.”
Sheila: [Miserably]: “So I’m
really responsible?”
Sheila: “But she was very pretty and
looked as if she could take care of herself.”
Sheila: “I was absolutely furious” and
“I was very rude to both of them.”
Inspector: “And so you
used the power you had.”
Sheila: “I’d never, never
do it again to anybody.”
