"You shouldn't call them that."
Cate says this to Ian in the hotel room as he has just let out a barrage of racial slurs. Cate has a sense of political conscience that Ian lacks, and her sensitivity leads her to resent Ian's bigotry.
"That was real?"
Ian asks this of Cate after she has just fainted and had a laughing and yelling fit. Ian does not respect Cate, and does not take her particularly seriously, even her alarming anxious episodes.
"It's not empty, there's gin in it."
Cate asks how Ian can smoke on an empty stomach, and this is his reply. This statement shows that Ian is a bundle of nerves and an emotional wreck. Day and night he drinks gin and smokes cigarettes even though one of his lungs has already been removed. He thinks only of his basest appetites, but not about his health and well-being, and his characterization of liquor as food demonstrates this.
"You don't know ... about me.
I went to school.
I made love with Col.
Bastards killed her, now I'm here.
Now I'm here."
The Soldier says this to Ian after having already committed atrocious acts against him. He attempts to justify his brutality and detachment by speaking, in fragments, about his own trauma, the fact that his girlfriend was killed. "Now I'm here," he says as a way of expressing some strange kind of remorse.
"Don't pity me, Cate. You don't have to fuck me 'cause I'm dying, but don't push your cunt in my face then take it away 'cause I stick my tongue out."
Ian says this to Cate after she has denied his sexual advances. He pins the blame on her for being withholding after trying to seduce him, but the audience knows that she did nothing to seduce him. In fact, she was being quite demure and unresponsive to his advances. This quote shows how manipulative and unethical Ian is.
"You don't want an accident. Think about your mum. And your brother. What would they think?"
Ian says this to Cate when she points the loaded gun at his groin. Suddenly, he is rendered a victim and he begins begging her not to shoot him, and trying to convince her that hurting him will only hurt her and ruin her life.
"Come over from God knows where have their kids and call them English they're not English born in England don't make you English."
When the Soldier tries to make a distinction between being Welsh and English to Ian, Ian becomes defensive and begins disparaging immigrants from other countries. Ian is exceedingly racist and xenophobic throughout the play, and this moment shows that part of his bigotry is wrapped up in his wanting to deflect from the fact that he is Welsh.
"Everything's got a scientific explanation."
At the end of the play, after he has been blinded by the soldier, Ian wants to die, so that he does not have to go through life as a blind person. Cate tries to talk him out of it and talks to him about her belief in an afterlife. Ian disagrees with her belief in the divine, insisting that science can explain everything, and death is final.
"He ate her eyes.
Poor bastard.
Poor love.
Poor fucking bastard."
The Soldier says this immediately after sucking each of Ian's eyes out of their sockets and eating them. He refers to his own grief about the fact that soldiers ate his lover's eyes. It serves as a way of justifying what he has just done to Ian, but it strikes a chilling note.
"Everyone in town is crying."
Cate says this in Scene 4 when she returns to the hotel room with a baby that someone has given her. She reports back to Ian about the world outside the hotel, that everyone is crying, as war has consumed the town and the soldiers have taken over.
