- Title Card: [Notes written in secret] The engine driver Duterne drinks wine. The engine driver Chaume drinks water. The stoker Larment drinks beer. The stoker Leger drinks vermouth... Sisif, engineer first class, drinks large amounts of alcohol.
- Train Worker: What's the matter with poor Sisif?
- Jacobin, Train Worker: You feel sorry for a fool who gambles all his money away? Just look at him! He thinks he's some barroom Christ with that light in the window behind him!
- Title Card: Sisaf had to catch his breath. His heart was pounding like a racing connecting rod, while the twilight trains grew blurred in the phantasmagoric mist.
- Jacques de Hersan: I must try to behave myself now. Yes, my dears, I am quite mad about a little lady of the Rail - - - who has such legs - -...
- Title Card: [Sisif imagines the Train is talking to him] "I will always be true to you, and when you're feeling sad, I will talk to you of her and you will hear her ethereal melancholy in the song of my wheels, in the everish pounding of my connecting rods, in my smoke-filled sighs."
- Sisif: There are no flowers amid the rails for us, son. You realize that, don't you? And if by some miracle one should blossom some day, we can be forgiven for reaching out for it.
- Pretty Pink-Cheeked Girl: Miss Norma, since you'll be spending the entire winter here, without any distractions, we thought you might like to come dance with us today.
- Norma: Let me just powder my face first.
- Title Card: And everything turned. Even the clouds, those white shadows of the mountains which danced the eternal tragic dance of the Wheel around the peaks.
- Title Card: There are shames that must be silenced! - - - OEDIPUS REX
- Title Card: There are the truly damned - - - men who bear the word "jinxed" written in mysterious letters in the crease of their brow. BEAUDELAIRE
- Title Card: For we must bear the Cross before the Cross bears us. CLAUDEL
- Title Card: I know the Creation is a Great Wheel which cannot move without crushing someone! - VICTOR HUGO
- Title Card: And it is said that they cannot themselves be free of the Wheel. - KIPLING
- Title Card: Paris: City of the inimitable tower of the Great Gallows and of the Wheel - - - - BLAISE CENDRARS
- Title Card: And they are all bound upon the Wheel - - - bound from life after life! - KIPLING