Melba Wooley: Cousin Em, what do you mean, gettin' sick like this?
Miss Em: When you're eighty years old, you expect to be sick. Sit down.
Melba Wooley: Now, now. Naughty, naughty. Eighty years *young* is what we say.
Miss Em: I don't. It's old, and I won't have it minimized. Takes a lot of livin' to get there, and pure, cursed endurance. Eighty years young indeed!


--Ethel Barrymore (as Miss Em) in Pinky

Lady Sophie Horfield: [Rhetorically] Who needs pity more than a woman who's sinned?


--Ethel Barrymore (as Lady Sophie Horfield) in The Paradine Case

Margaret Garrison: [to her daughters] You'll be happy to know that stupidity is not hereditary. You acquired it all by yourselves.


--Ethel Barrymore (as ) in Deadline - U.S.A.

Alice Garrison Courtney: [Margaret Garrison announces she's buying back the family newspaper] What changed your mind?
Margaret Garrison: Have you seen today's paper? And yesterday's? Loyalty changed my mind. A principle evidently lacking in today's generation.
Katherine Garrison Geary: You haven't got the money to buy the paper.
Margaret Garrison: I'll get it.
Alice Garrison Courtney: You're crazy.
Margaret Garrison: No, just ashamed. Ashamed for me, for you and for your father. I'm not going to let this paper die. If that makes me crazy, I'm good and crazy.


--Ethel Barrymore (as ) in Deadline - U.S.A.