Sophie's Choice Quotes

A mother has to make a very difficult decision.

SS officer: [to Sophie] You're so beautiful. I'd like to get you in bed. Are you a Polack? You! Are you also one of those filthy communists?
[walks away]
Sophie: I am a Pole! I was born in Cracow! I am not a Jew. Neither are my children! They're not Jews. They are racially pure. I am a Christian. I am a devout Christian.
[the officer comes back]
SS officer: You are not a communist? You are a believer?
Sophie: Yes sir, I believe in Christ.
SS officer: You believe in Christ the redeemer?
Sophie: Yes.
SS officer: [looks at Sophie's children] Did He not say... "Suffer the children, come unto me?"
[Sophie remains silent]
SS officer: You may keep one of your children.
Sophie: I beg your pardon?
SS officer: You may keep one of your children. The other must go away.
Sophie: You mean, I have to choose?
SS officer: You are a Polack, not a Yid. That gives you a privilege, a choice.
Sophie: I can't choose. I can't choose!
SS officer: Be quiet.
Sophie: I can't choose!
SS officer: Make a choice. Or I'll send both of them over there. Make a choice.
Sophie: Don't make me choose! I can't!
SS officer: Shut up! Enough! I'll send them both over there! I told you to shut up! Make a choice!
Sophie: I can't choose! Please! I can't choose!
SS officer: [to an officer] Take BOTH children away!
[Sophie clings on to her son while the Nazis take her screaming and crying daughter away from her]
Sophie: Take my little girl! Take my baby!

Sophie: My mother, she's very sick, you know. And I can't do anything. But I think - if only I could have got - that meat for my mother it would make her strong. So I go to the country and er... the peasants were selling ham and I buy it with the black market money and I bring it back. But it's forbidden, you know, because all the meat goes to the Germans. So I sat on the train and I hid it under my skirt, I am pretending that I am pregnant, you know? Oh I was so afraid. I was shaking. And then the German, was in front of the train and he saw me. So he come over and take under my skirt that ham and...
[pause]
Sophie: So they sent me Auschwitz.
Stingo: You were sent to Auschwitz because you stole a ham?
Sophie: No, I was sent to Auschwitz because they saw that I was afraid.

Stingo: I was twenty two, and a virgin, and was clasping in my arms at last the goddess of my unending fantasies. My lust was inexhaustible. Sophie's lust was both a plunge into carnal oblivion, and a flight from memory and grief. More than that, I now see it was a frantic attempt to beat back death.

Sophie: Stingo, you look... you look very nice, you're wearing your cocksucker.
Stingo: That's my "seersucker."

Stingo: [groping interrupted] What is going on!
Leslie Lapidus: You don't understand. I can't go all the way. I've reached a plateau in my analysis. Before I reached this plateau of vocalization, I could never have said any of those words. Those Anglo-Saxon four-letter words that everybody should be able to say, and now I'm completely able to vocalize.
Stingo: [narrating] Leslie Lapidus could say fuck, but she could not do it.

Nathan Landau: On this bridge on which so many great Americans writers stood and reached out for words to give America its voice... looking toward the land that gave them Whitman... from its Eastern edge dreamt his country's future and gave it words... on this span of which Thomas Wolfe and Hart Crane wrote, we welcome Stingo into that pantheon of the Gods... whose words are all we know of immortality. To Stingo!

[last lines]
Stingo: And so ended my voyage of discovery in a place as strange as Brooklyn. I let go the rage and sorrow for Sophie and Nathan, and the many others who were but a few of the butchered and betrayed and martyred children of the earth. When I could finally see again, I saw the first rays of daylight reflected in the murky river. This was not Judgement Day, only morning. Morning, excellent and fair.

Sophie: Don't you see? We are dying. I longed desperately to escape, to pack my bags and flee, but I did not.

[first lines]
Narrator: It was 1947, two years after the war, when I began my journey to what my father called the Sodom of the north, New York. They called me Stingo, which was the nick name I was known by in those days, if I was called anything at all.

Stingo: I let go the rage and sorrow for Sophie and Nathan... and for the many others who were but a few of the butchered and betrayed and martyred children of the Earth. When I could finally see again, I saw the first rays of daylight reflected in the murky river. This was not judgment day. Only morning; morning, excellent and fair.

Stingo: Sophie, I want to understand. I'd like to know the truth.
Sophie: The truth does not make it easier to understand, you know. I mean, you think that you find out the truth about me, and then you'll understand me. And then you would forgive me for all those... for all my lies.
Stingo: I promise, I'll never leave you.
Sophie: You must never promise that. No one, no one should ever promise that. Ah, the truth, ah, the truth, I don't even know what is the truth - after all the lies I have told.

Sophie: Yeah umm it looked like something that the... the scares the birds... you know... what is that... umm scur... scrul... I had scurbutt!
Nathan Landau: [to Stingo] No, no, no she means scurvy.
Sophie: Yeah...
Nathan Landau: And typhus, and anemia and scarlet fever...
Sophie: Yeah...
Nathan Landau: Was fucking miracle that she emerged from that camp alive.
Sophie: Right.

Sophie: So, we'll go to that farm tomorrow. But please, Stingo, don't talk about marriage and children. It's enough that we'll go down there on that farm to live... for a while.

Sophie: [in broken English] I am six months in the... in here, in U.S., and so I eat more good now than in my life.

Sophie: [after having taken a sip of the wine that Nathan has poured for her] Mmm. You know, when you... when you live a good life... like a saint... and then you die, that must be what they make you to drink in paradise.

Nathan Landau: But I'm a biologist
Sophie: [looks away confusedly] Yeah...

Narrator: [narrating] How could I have failed to have the most helpless crush on such a generous mind and life-enlarging mentor. Nathan was utterly, fatally glamorous

Nathan Landau: You spent the whole fucking afternoon with him, or should I say, you spent the whole afternoon fucking him.

Sophie: [gently reading his palm] You will mountains.
Stingo: Right now I can't even move my tongue.

Nathan Landau: This toast is in honor of my disassociation of you two creeps. Disassociation from you, coony captive cunt of king's county. And you, the dreary dregs of dixie.

Nathan Landau: [about Sophie] When I first met this one here, she was a rag and a bone and a hank of hair. And that was a whole year-and-a-half after the Russians had liberated the camp she was in.

Nathan Landau: To Stingo!

Sophie's Choice Quotes

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