- Patrick: I guess you could call anything a marriage if you wanted to, but... well, I've always held out for a marriage that *is* a marriage.
- Elizabeth: What is the whole idea of marriage?
- Patrick: Well, to make a home - establish a family.
- Elizabeth: What about happiness? Personal happiness?
- Patrick: People who want to be happy every minute can never be happy. Happiness is something that you... well, you get when... when you begin to understand that there are more important things.
- Gambler: Any psychiatrist will tell you that a gambler is a case of arrested development - and I am sick of being arrested, and I'm sick of losing, too.
- [first lines]
- William Saroyan: I'm William Saroyan. This play happens on a day made for daydreaming, so of course it's about marriage. Everyone knows such a day - uh, one or two every year. Everything on such a day seems both wide awake and fast asleep. The light on such a day is exceptionally good, too, so that all of a sudden it's easy to see faraway things like islands, church spires, the towers of tall buildings, snow on mountaintops, and so on. The air on such a day is good to breathe, too - even mistakes of a whole lifetime suddenly seem insignificant, and unworthy of regret. In a world in which perfection must always remain only a word, perfection itself seems possible at last - with a little luck. Such days are almost too good to be true for human beings; perhaps it's just as well that they don't happen too often. When they do happen, though, they seem to change everybody - for the better.
- Boy: They say that people that can't afford to get married shouldn't get married. I don't know; how can you tell you *can* afford it until you get married?