- Odo: You can't just wipe out a civilization. We'd be committing mass murder.
- Major Kira: It's like stepping on ants, Odo!
- Odo: I don't step on ants, Major.
- Arjin: You're nothing like I expected.
- Lieutenant Jadzia Dax: I'm nothing like I expected. Life after life, with each new personality stampeding around in your head, you get desires that scare you, dreams that used to belong to someone else.
- Lieutenant Jadzia Dax: Arjin, if you truly want to become a Trill host someday, you'll never call me 'ma'am' again.
- Arjin: Yes... Lieutenant.
- Lieutenant Jadzia Dax: Why don't you try 'Jadzia'?
- Arjin: If you think that's appropriate.
- Lieutenant Jadzia Dax: Oh, I'm sure it isn't appropriate at all. But then I hate to be appropriate.
- Commander Sisko: Personal log, supplemental - One hour. One hour to make a decision that could mean the life or death of a civilization - or the end to our own. My mind keeps going back to the Borg, how I despised their indifference, as they tried to exterminate us. And I have to ask myself: would I be any different if I destroyed another universe, to preserve my own?
- Jake Sisko: I wanted to tell you, but I was sure you wouldn't understand.
- Commander Sisko: So now you're hiding things from me?
- Jake Sisko: You mean you would have understood?
- Commander Sisko: Of course not!
- [Quark tells Arjin how he once carelessly threw away a promising career]
- Arjin: How did you recover?
- Quark: Never did. Look at me, tending bar out here in Wormhole Junction while the big boys fly by me at warp speed. You only get one shot at the latinum stairway. If you miss it... you miss it. Welcome to the club, son.
- [Quark arrives with a Cardassian vole in Ops]
- Quark: It ran right across a dabo table!
- Major Kira: How'd it die? Get into your food?
- Quark: As landlords, you're responsible for this. I expect vermin control, or I'm gonna have to...
- Major Kira: Leave? Oh, please say leave. I'd take a Cardassian vole over you any day.
- [walks off]
- Quark: The girl insists on fighting her latent attraction to me.
- Chief O'Brien: [reading] "It worked in Hamelin".
- [Bashir's note to his "solution" against the vole plague: a flute]
- Lieutenant Jadzia Dax: Jadzia Dax is not Curzon Dax. But I am Dax. And I'm slowly coming to terms with what that means to me. Sometimes it means gambling or wrestling; sometimes it means waking up an initiate, before he slides into the middle of the pack and gets overlooked.
- Arjin: [surprised] You're giving me another chance?
- Lieutenant Jadzia Dax: You are the only one who can give yourself another chance. You can't simply do this anymore, to meet other people's expectations - not your father's, not your teachers', and not mine. You need to discover what Arjin wants out of life, out of joining.
- Lieutenant Jadzia Dax: You haven't touched your racht.
- Arjin: No, I have, er... It's interesting.
- Lieutenant Jadzia Dax: No, you've moved around your plate to make it look like you've touched it.
- Arjin: I didn't have to move it. It moved itself.
- Commander Sisko: So - what are you going to do? This kid has to measure up soon, or he'll never be chosen. True? So you're not doing him any favors by avoiding a confrontation, are you? Curzon was tough - maybe even abusive in his own charming way. But he always demanded the highest standards of excellence from these host candidates.
- Lieutenant Jadzia Dax: You don't know what he did to me.
- Commander Sisko: I know you made it through the program.
- Lieutenant Jadzia Dax: No thanks to him.
- Commander Sisko: Are you sure?
- Lieutenant Jadzia Dax: You don't know me as well as you think you do. I'm sure you looked at all the training profiles. But that doesn't tell you who Jadzia really was before she was joined. She was the quietest, shyest, most withdrawn young woman you've ever known - brilliant, top grades... and not a clue to what life was about. She'd never lived outside the program. And it didn't matter because she was sailing through it. Until she met Curzon Dax. Curzon sized her up in about twenty seconds, and made the next two weeks the most miserable of her life. She cried herself to sleep every night. She hated him for it. But when the field training was over and she learned about Curzon's recommendation to terminate her from the program, she went back a different woman. She found her voice and reapplied. She tore through the program with a passion, a vengeance. And in the end the administrators chose her for joining.
- Arjin: How did you wind up with the Dax-symbiont?
- Lieutenant Jadzia Dax: When I found out Curzon was dying, I requested the Dax-symbiont.
- Arjin: And Curzon didn't object?
- Lieutenant Jadzia Dax: No. Then I've never been sure quite why - except, as I've come to know Curzon's dark sense of humor, I have a feeling the irony might have appealed to him.
- Chief O'Brien: [to Quark; about the Cardassian voles] I believe I found a way to make the voles beg for mercy.
- Quark: What is it?
- Chief O'Brien: [pulls out a flashlight-like device and presses a button] Well, it's a sonic...
- [O'Brien is interrupted by an high-pitched agonized squeal from Quark]
- Quark: AUUUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHH!
- [Quark collapses to the floor; screaming almost unintelligibly]
- Quark: STOP! STOP!
- [O'Brien turns the device off. Quark slowly stands up, looking dazed and experimentally slapping his ringing ears]
- Chief O'Brien: [worried] Are you all right?
- [Quark looks at him blankly]
- Chief O'Brien: [louder] Are you all right?
- Quark: [still unable to hear what O'Brien is saying] What?