Dominique Michel credited as playing...
Dominique St. Arnaud
- Dominique St. Arnaud: Is the frantic drive for personal happiness we see in society today, linked to the decline of the American empire as we are now experiencing it?
- Dominique St. Arnaud: It's my premise that the concept of personal happiness permeates the literature of a nation or civilization as its influence wanes.
- Diane Leonard: [describing her current relationship] But I have to stop, because... it's getting dangerous.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: You're afraid of him?
- Diane Leonard: No, it's me I'm afraid of.
- Diane Leonard: Such simple souls, they shout 'Mamma' when they come.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: Yes, that's right. The first time a man shouted 'Mamma,' 'Mamma mia!', I thought his mother had come in. I wanted to hide under the bed.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: A civilization's decline is as inevitable as old age. We can try to slow down the process. That's all.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: Marx was your average middle-class German who fucked the maid behind his wife's back. His theories are rooted in his sense of guilt. Same for Freud. A latent homosexual... unable to lay his wife after age 40... hot and bothered over his female patients. His quarrels with Jung... were really about women... about sex.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: [referring to Canada] We're fortunate here to be on the outskirts of the empire. The shocks are less violent. Life in these times can be very pleasant in some respects.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: You should write a paper on that.
- Pierre: 17,000 scholarly articles are published every day. One more or less...
- Dominique St. Arnaud: [describing Rémy's sex life] Anyone in a skirt at school... down to the last secretary. And then there are all the others. He told me he laid Louise's sister and really got off on it.
- Alain: But he's not that handsome.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: Doesn't mean a thing. He loves sex. That's irresistible. So many men don't really enjoy it.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: It's one thing I can't stomach.
- Alain: What?
- Dominique St. Arnaud: Blindness. People who are unable to see reality.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: Rémy's special... He's screwed all Montreal.
- Alain: He says he's like the Red Cross, a universal donor.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: I just can't take these middle-class housewives with their cute husbands and cute kids. I've watched so many men getting dressed at 2 a.m.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: [asking for comments on her theory] You haven't said a word about the book.
- Louise: I bet they agree with me but are scared to say so.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: I think they feel superior.
- Pierre: Superior? Why?
- Dominique St. Arnaud: [referring to Pierre and Rémy] Because you've both slept with me.
- Pierre: What does that have to do with it?
- Dominique St. Arnaud: I think that for men like you... love always entails a struggle for power. Rémy's often said he'd like to seduce a big intellectual... I don't know, say...
- Alain: Susan Sontag.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: Right. It's the urge to appropriate her. To dominate her, almost physically.
- Claude: Come on... it can also be the desire to share, to be with.
- Dominique St. Arnaud: Perhaps. But I can't trust the disdain of men who've made me come, who've had me.