- Lov: I want a young wife. I ain't gonna take no 23-year-old woman for a wife... have everybody laughin' at me.
- Jeeter: Why, Ada here never... never spoke a word to me for the first 10 years we were married. Heh! Them were the happiest 10 years of my life.
- Clerk: Look here, son, what do you mean to marry a woman that old? You ought to marry a girl your own age.
- Sister Bessie: You're trying to talk him out of it and I'll start a service right here and now.
- Dude Lester: Dunno, Sister Bessie there, she sweet-talked me into it.
- Clerk: How's that boy gonna support you?
- Sister Bessie: The Lord will provide.
- Clerk: I'm afraid that ain't gonna be soon, because he ain't gonna get married through this office!
- [first lines]
- Jeeter: [voice over] This is Tobacco Road today. But a hundred years ago, when the first Lesters came to Georgia, it was different. It run fifteen miles down the ridge to the Savannah River, through the richest cotton and tobacco plantations in the whole South, past fine big homes that the Lesters themselves built and lived in. But that was a hundred years ago. Come a time then when the land fell fallow and worse and worse. But you'd think the Lesters would leave it? No, sir. They stayed on and on. But all that they had and all that they were, that's all gone with the wind and the dust. And this... this is Tobacco Road today.