- Lyudmila Gurina: Don't cry.
- Lyudmila Gurina: You know what Moscow thinks of tears.
- Lyudmila Gurina: We shouldn't be sitting around, we should do something.
- Club director Olga Pavlovna: How about that? Chief Engineer in a factory and he comes to us. 99 percent are intellectuals. They suffer more than the others. But you should see the ladies. Gorgeous human beings! Well-bred, intelligent and pretty too! You wonder what do men want. It's a mystery.
- Antonina Buyanova: Are there a lot of people under you?
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: Nearly three thousand.
- Antonina Buyanova: Organizing all that must be very hard work.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: It's hard getting the first three workers organized, then it's easy.
- Rodion 'Rudolph' Rachkov: Look, don't try to make me the villain. I feel like we're personages from some melodrama. He's a jerk, she's a saint. Only in our case, you're the one who lied to me! Well, no use crying over spilt milk. We can still be friends though.
- Club director Olga Pavlovna: Today, lonely souls don't know how to meet one another. People just watch television and don't even know who lives next door. Among those who got married, two were living in the very same apartment building. They wouldn't have met one another. It was only because of our club. And that's what you call urbanization!
- Lyudmila Gurina: Where are you going after that?
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: To the Tretiakov Gallery.
- Lyudmila Gurina: After all I taught you about how to get a man, and you go there. The only kind of men you're going to find there are tourists.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: I go to see the paintings, not the men.
- Lyudmila Gurina: Well, I'm going to visit the Lenin Library's biology department today. Imagine the clientele it's got. The kind of men there. Doctors, academicians, philosophers.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: Are you going to spend your morning watching them read?
- Lyudmila Gurina: No, I'll hang around the smoking section.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: You got to have a television.
- Nikolay: Absolutely. When the furniture's paid up, we're going to buy a TV set.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: Tonia, you'd better start with the television set. Because the television is the future of mankind.
- Lyudmila Gurina: You've led a perfectly honest sort of life, and what d'ya got to show for it, just a couple of hairs on your head.
- Nikolay: Baldness is in style nowadays.
- Lyudmila Gurina: This chemistry of yours is so boring. Nothing but formulas.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: You don't understand. Chemistry's the future of mankind.
- Lyudmila Gurina: You should be thinking more about your present.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: Rudy said that in the West, they celebrate special events in restaurants.
- Nikolay's mother, Anna Nikitichna: They have all gone crazy over there. What kind of food can you get in a restaurant?
- Rodion 'Rudolph' Rachkov: Someday television will change our lives. We'll never go to the movies, and theatre and literature will die. We'll only be interested in television.
- Poet: Don't you think you're getting carried away? Theatre, I agree, isn't going to last long, but really, movies, books...
- Rodion 'Rudolph' Rachkov: Just wait twenty years and you'll see.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: Well, in twenty years everything will be completely changed.
- Anton Kruglov: It isn't all that much, twenty years.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: In twenty years I'll be old.
- Anton Kruglov: Believe me, at forty you'll think that your life just begins.
- Club director Olga Pavlovna: You can see what's going on. You at the municipality do nothing but talk when you should be helping us.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: How can we help?
- Club director Olga Pavlovna: We're short of funds, we're short of men!
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: You know as well as I do, that in Moscow, there're five single women for every forty-year-old bachelor.
- Club director Olga Pavlovna: But we can't abandon those who need us!
- Nikolay: We're going to watch a concert.
- Aunt Pasha: To watch a concert! And you call yourself a Muscovite!
- Antonina Buyanova: You know, he's so shy.
- Lyudmila Gurina: Yeah, you wouldn't call him an intellectual. You could have found a dunce like him at home in your village.
- Antonina Buyanova: He's taking me to watch a concert.
- Lyudmila Gurina: To watch a concert! After two years in Moscow you can't talk properly.
- Antonina Buyanova: I'm always holding you up to the children as an example. You've achieved everything you wanted to.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: Only don't tell them that once you've gotten everything you wanted, you feel like howling.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: I just love your dill pickles. I can't stop eating them.
- Nikolay's mother, Anna Nikitichna: That's Misha who makes them.
- Lyudmila Gurina: I never knew that you liked dill pickles.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: I do now.
- Lyudmila Gurina: Are you trying to tell us something? Tell me how it happened.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: I don't know what you mean.
- Lyudmila Gurina: I mean are you pregnant?
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: Yes.
- Lyudmila Gurina: Why is it that generals always have the same kind of wife? I would have made a perfect general's wife!
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: This is great...
- Lyudmila Gurina: What's so great? I take one look at all this and it depresses me. I'd kill myself rather than live here. Everything's decided in advance. You save up to buy a TV set, after that it's a washing machine, then a refrigerator. You've got a twenty-year plan like the government.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: What's so bad about it?
- Lyudmila Gurina: What's good living like that? Don't you understand that we live in Moscow? And Moscow's one big lottery, you can hit the jackpot. Moscow is full of diplomats, artists, actors and poets. Practically they're all men. And we're women.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: What do they need us for? They have their own women.
- Lyudmila Gurina: But we're no worse than the others.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: Where can we find those artists?
- Lyudmila Gurina: That's the point. We have to find them. Leave it to me.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: What if they ask me a question and I give a dumb answer?
- Lyudmila Gurina: Do it, but like you mean it. That's called point of view. Take me, I'm pretty vulgar, right?
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: You said it, I didn't.
- Lyudmila Gurina: Well, guys call it eccentric.
- Anton Kruglov: There're too many rebels now. They criticize the older generation. They want to know why we kept silent for so long. I wonder what they would have done in our place.
- Poet: We would have spoken up.
- Georgiy 'Gosha': How come you never did get married?
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: I was waiting for you.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: With an observant mind like yours, you ought to work as a weather man.
- Georgiy 'Gosha': I can tell that you're not married.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: Because you don't see a wedding ring on my finger?
- Georgiy 'Gosha': Even if you were wearing three wedding rings on each hand, you still have that unmarried look about you.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: You mean single women have a special look about them?
- Georgiy 'Gosha': Their look is kind of searching. The same look police usually have, an executive has it, and a single woman has it too.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: You go to the theatre or museum and what do you see? Only women. The men are watching television or drinking with their friends. Once they reach forty, they vegetate. They don't even polish their shoes, it's disgusting! I hate men who wear dirty shoes. It's crude.
- Aleksandra - Katerina's Daughter: Where did you find him?
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: In the train.
- Aleksandra - Katerina's Daughter: I didn't know you were cruising for men in trains. I'm a little surprised.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: Not half as surprised as I am, though.
- Lyudmila Gurina: I was told how to meet a single man. You go to a cemetery. You're bound to meet an intellectual who's a recent widower. You let him look at you, and the next thing you know... A friend of mine actually married an architect that way.
- Aleksandra - Katerina's Daughter: You mean that you want to marry her?
- Georgiy 'Gosha': Yes.
- Aleksandra - Katerina's Daughter: Have you known her for a long time?
- Georgiy 'Gosha': Forty-four hours and about twenty-two minutes.
- Aleksandra - Katerina's Daughter: But Mother has always been of the opinion that you have to know a man well to marry him, and that takes time.
- Georgiy 'Gosha': Right, to marry a person after only a two-day acquaintance is a very thoughtless act. It's best to wait about a week. So you can let me know next Wednesday.
- Aleksandra - Katerina's Daughter: Why didn't you continue your education?
- Georgiy 'Gosha': What for?
- Aleksandra - Katerina's Daughter: To become an executive.
- Georgiy 'Gosha': Should everyone be an executive?
- Aleksandra - Katerina's Daughter: No, not at all, but everyone wants to.
- Georgiy 'Gosha': Ever hear of the Roman emperor Diocletian? At the very height of his empire, he just gave away the crown and settled down somewhere in the country. And when he was asked to take over again, he said: Once you've seen the cabbages that I've grown, you'll stop asking me.
- Aleksandra - Katerina's Daughter: He never went back?
- Georgiy 'Gosha': No. You see, not everybody wants to be some kind of leader. Although it seems to be the only case in the history of the world.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: Believe me, everything will work out for the best. Life begins at 40. It may sound trite, but it's true. Goodbye, and please don't call me up anymore.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: Using your fists is no way to settle problems.
- Aleksandra - Katerina's Daughter: And if they don't understand words?
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: Then you didn't explain properly.
- Nikolay: Does he have any particular marks I can look for? A scar, for instance?
- Aleksandra - Katerina's Daughter: Not that I know of.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: They took out his appendix.
- Nikolay: That's not what I meant.
- Georgiy 'Gosha': What's wrong?
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: It's been such a long time!
- Georgiy 'Gosha': Eight days.
- Katerina 'Katya' Tikhomirova: No. I looked for you a long time!