Boris Lermontov: The music is all that matters. Nothing but the music.


--Anton Walbrook (as Boris Lermontov) in The Red Shoes

Boris Lermontov: You cannot have it both ways. A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love can never be a great dancer. Never.


--Anton Walbrook (as Boris Lermontov) in The Red Shoes

Prince Albert: If an Englishman grows sentiments, he goes out into the garden and shoots himself.


--Anton Walbrook (as ) in Victoria the Great

Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff: Do you remember, Clive, we used to say: "Our army is fighting for our homes, our women, and our children"? Now the women are fighting beside the men. The children are trained to shoot. What's left is the "home." But what is the "home" without women and children?


--Anton Walbrook (as Theo Kretschmar) in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff: You know that, after the war, we had very bad years in Germany. We got poorer and poorer. Every day retired officers or schoolteachers were caught shoplifting. Money lost its value, the price of everything rose except of human beings. We read in the newspapers that the after-war years were bad everywhere, that crime was increasing and that honest citizens were having a hard job to put the gangsters in jail. Well in Germany, the gangsters finally succeeded in putting the honest citizens in jail.


--Anton Walbrook (as Theo Kretschmar) in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

[Describing the ballet of the Red Shoes]
Boris Lermontov: "The Ballet of The Red Shoes" is from a fairy tale by Hans Andersen. It is the story of a young girl who is devoured with an ambition to attend a dance in a pair of Red Shoes. She gets the shoes and goes to the dance. For a time, all goes well and she is very happy. At the end of the evening she is tired and wants to go home, but the Red Shoes are not tired. In fact, the Red Shoes are never tired. They dance her out into the street, they dance her over the mountains and valleys, through fields and forests, through night and day. Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the Red Shoes go on.
Julian Craster: What happens in the end?
Boris Lermontov: Oh, in the end, she dies.


--Anton Walbrook (as Boris Lermontov) in The Red Shoes