Gabriel Byrne credited as playing...
Friedrich Bhaer
- Friedrich Bhaer: But I have nothing to give you. My hands are empty.
- [entwines her hands with his]
- Jo March: Not empty now.
- Friedrich Bhaer: Your heart understood mine. In the depth of the fragrant night, I listened with ravished soul to your beloved voice. Your heart understood mine.
- Friedrich Bhaer: [having read Jo's latest book] You should be writing from life, from the depths of your soul. There is *nothing* in here of the woman that I am privileged to know.
- Friedrich Bhaer: You do not take wine?
- Jo March: Only medicinally.
- Friedrich Bhaer: Pretend you've got a cold.
- Jo March: Friedrich, this is what I write. My apologies if it fails to live up to your high standards.
- Friedrich Bhaer: Jo, there is more to you than this. If you have the courage to write it.
- Friedrich Bhaer: I am going to the west. They need teachers and they are not so concerned about the accent.
- Jo March: I don't mind it either.
- Friedrich Bhaer: You know, when first I saw you I thought "ah, she is a writer".
- Jo March: What made you think so?
- [Friedrich indicates her inky fingers]
- Jo March: I don't have an opera dress.
- Friedrich Bhaer: You will be perfect. Where we are sitting, we shall not be so - formal.
- Friedrich Bhaer: Lunatics. Vampires. This - This interests you?
- Jo March: Well, people like thrilling stories, Friedrich. This is what the newspapers want.
- Jo March: My mother and father were part of a - rather unusual circle in Concord. Do you know the word transcendentalist?
- Friedrich Bhaer: But this is German Romantic philosophy! We throw off all our constraints and we come to know ourselves through insight and experience. But it got out of fashion now.
- Jo March: Well, not in the March family, I'm afraid. It's just that with all of this transcendence - comes much emphasis on perfecting oneself.
- Friedrich Bhaer: This gives you a problem?
- Jo March: I'm hopelessly flawed.
- Friedrich Bhaer: If only we could - transcend ourselves without perfection - like your poet Walt Whitman - who rides up and down the streets of Broadway all day shouting poetry against the roar of the carts. "Keep your silent woods, O, Nature..."