- [first lines]
- Tour Guide: And there, ladies and gentlemen, on the other side of the lake we have the famous Villa Diodati where Lord Byron, greatest living English poet, resides in exile. Romantic, scholar, duelist, best-selling author of Childe Harold, he was forced to leave his native land after many scandals including incest and adultery with Lady Caroline Lamb. "Mad, bad and dangerous to know" she called him.
- [the guide squeezes a lady's hand and points]
- Tour Guide: Bedroom - top right.
- Byron: Of course, I eat merely to live. Imagination is my sustenance for such time as life offers more pleasure than death.
- Byron: Then let us live and love so that people will say, The Devil as well as God is an Englishman.
- Byron: Switzerland is a selfish, cursed, swinish country of brutes. It just happens to be placed in the most romantic region in the world.
- Claire Clairmont: What's the first course?
- Byron: Your lips.
- Claire Clairmont: Second course?
- Byron: Your body.
- Claire Clairmont: Dessert?
- Byron: Your soul!
- Byron: Terror has an irresistible beauty, Shiloh. Would the smooth neck of a woman be so desirable were it not for our secret wish to see upon it a trickle of blood? Forget your women, Shiloh. Do not waste your brilliant words upon them. Poets are for each other.
- Byron: I have no love for any. I can hardly be the stoic with a woman who has scrambled a thousand miles to unphilosophize me.
- Mary Shelley: Go on. Tell us, my lord, how does it feel to fuck with your own sister?
- Byron: As pathetic as with any female, Miss Godwin.
- Mary Shelley: We're dead. It showed me the torture it has in store for us. Our creature,it will be there waiting in the shadows in the shape of our fears until it has seen us to our deaths.
- Byron: To think that in England, I was woken by larks. Here it is the song of the lesser spotted nubile.
- Byron: There are no ghosts in daylight. You'll get used to our nights at Diodati. A little indulgence to heighten our existence on this miserable Earth. Nights of the mind, the imagination. Nothing more.