- Chief Policeman: [the Poet has just been sentenced by the Wazir, and the Chief Policeman enters to find him and Lalume, the Wazir's wife, kissing] What kind of a sentence did he get?
- Caliph Guard: [closing lines] Is this man to be pardoned, O Caliph?
- Omar: Pardon him, All Highest. His crime was a service. Let him go free.
- Poet: No, don't ask that. Under the circumstances it would embarrass the All Highest to pardon his father-in-law. O, Prince of Justice, let me help you to compose this most difficult of verdicts against a man who in his life never once did right and who never once wronged anyone. Condemn the scoundrel to some dreadful oasis at least a week's camel journey away. Force him to take with him the widow of the soon-to-be late Wazir...
- [turning to Lalume, the Wazir's wife, and speaking under his breath]
- Poet: and all the property she can get her hands on before the accounts are audited.
- [turning back to the Caliph, in full voice]
- Poet: Condemn him to lighten her sorrow and to toil ceaselessly to remove all grief from her heart.
- Lalume: You have just condemned yourself for life, My Lord.
- Poet: And finally, O Prince of True Believers, take from me my greatest treasure, my daughter, Marsinah. Take her away forever by marrying her to the end of her days.
- Caliph: Such is the Caliph's pleasure. And so he orders.
- Poet: [singing] Princes come, princes go. / An hour of pomp and show. / They know princes come / and over the sands and over the sands of time they go. / Wise men come ever promising the riddle of life to know. / Wise men come, but over the sands / the silent sands of time they go. / Lovers come, lovers go / and all that there is to know / lovers know, only lovers know.
- Lalume: [singing] On days when my lord groweth restless / and bored with his sword and his plume. / His handmaiden hath what he needeth. / And what doth he need? Rahadlakum!
- Poet: May your taxes increase!
- [said when acting as a beggar to get the Baghdad merchants to give him alms]