"We must always envy someone we should not, be jealous of those who have so much less. You and Claire make so much sense together, talk so well." - Agnes

"Yes, but they've bought the plague with them, and that's another matter. Let me tell you something about disease . . . mortal illness; you either are immune to it...or you fight it." - Agnes

"What do you really have in common with your very best friend . . . 'cept the coincidence of having cheated on your wives in the same summer with the same woman . . . girl . . . woman? What except that?" - Claire

"This isn't the first time, you know. This isn't the first time you've come back with one of your goddamned marriages on the rocks. Four! Count 'em!" - Tobias

""To keep in shape." Have you heard the expression? Most people misunderstand it, assume it means to alteration, when it does not. Maintenance. When we keep something in shape, we maintain its shape—whether we are proud of that shape, or not, is another matter—we keep it from falling apart. We do not attempt the impossible. We maintain. We hold." - Agnes

"There is a balance to be maintained, after all, though the rest of you teeter, unconcerned, or uncaring, assuming you're on level ground .  .  . by divine right, I gather, though that is hardly so." - Agnes

On Reception of the Play

"Robert Brustein, writing in The New Republic, found the play to be little more than "an old house which an interior decorator has tried to furnish with reproductions and pieces bought at auction" while Richard Gilman, in Newsweek, attacked what he saw as the "inflated dialogue," the "kind of cliché that is all too prominent in Albee's rhetoric"" (Bigsby 223).

Rooney, in his review, says that Albee "maps out a picture of upper-middle-class complacency and then mercilessly confronts his characters with the depths of their denial, in action that unfolds from Friday night through Sunday morning.”

“A Delicate Balance is the sort of play that might be written if there were no theater. It exists outside itself, beside itself, aloof from itself, as detached from the hard floor of the Martin Beck, where it opened last night, as its alarmed characters are detached from themselves. The effect is deliberate—because it is precisely hollowness that is most on Mr. Albee’s mind—and it is offered to us on an elegantly lacquered empty platter the moment the curtain goes up.”
—Walter Kerr, The New York Times

“Albee is too able a playwright to really lose his audience. Yet where this should grip us, it merely holds us with a limp but unreleasing hand, like an acquaintance too long leaving.”
—Norman Nadel, World-Journal Tribune

“The fourth in a series of disappointments that Albee has been turning out since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, [A Delicate Balance], like its predecessors, suffers from a borrowed style and a hollow center. It also suggests that Albee's talent for reproduction has begun to fail him until by now the labels on his lendings are all but exposed to public view. Reviewers have already noted the stamp of T. S. Eliot on A Delicate Balance … and it is quite true that Albee, like Eliot before him, is now trying to invest the conventional drawing-room comedy with metaphysical significance. But where Eliot was usually impelled by a religious vision, Albee seems to be stimulated by mere artifice, and the result is emptiness, emptiness, emptiness.”
—Robert Brustein, The Third Theatre

“I sat there in the Martin Beck Theater sometimes all but hypnotized by the flow of words, sometimes amused at a pert and suddenly deft observation of human frailties and encounters. But I also sat there wishing heartily that Mr. Albee would come to the point and tell us, in a playwright’s explicit terms, just what he wanted to say.”
—Whitney Bolton, Morning Telegraph

“Edward Albee’s new play is a dictionary with neither definitions nor order—a pile of verbiage accumulated for the sake of a trivial and naïve point. Just what this collection was doing in the mouths of various, well-meaning actors is not clear. Nor is the absence of Mr. Albee’s sense of the stage explainable.”
—Martin Gottfried, Women’s Wear Daily

On Edna and Harry

"We must be helpful when we can, my dear; that is the...

responsibility, the double demand of friendship...is 

it not?"

-Edna 

Edna and Harry's arrival throws the play into a state of chaos. Julia becomes extremely upset because her room has been taken over by Edna and Harry while the rest of the family tries to figure out what exactly the couple was so scared of. Edna and Harry give no definitive answers of what has scared them out of their home, leaving the reader to struggle to understand what could've scared two adults so much. It becomes apparent that what has scared the couple is not something physical. It is a symbol of all that the play tries to tackle—isolation, the degradation of relationships, and the illusion of perfection.

On Julia

"If you're begging, you may not have your pride!"

Julia returns home after the dissolution of her fourth marriage, "Right on schedule, once every three years." Her return home is the talk of the house amongst the family and even Edna and Harry. Julia believes the source of the problem in her marriages were her husband and not herself. Tobias does admit that Julia "may have been pushed on Charlie" when she asks if it is really her who is picking the men that she marries. It is her family's, particularly her mother's, expectations and wanting to maintain the status quo that push Julia to men who do not suit her, but men her family would approve of.

On Claire

"We submerge our truths and have our sunsets on trouble waters." -Claire

Claire is labeled as the stereotypical alcoholic by almost all of the characters within the play, but she serves as much more than that. Claire is ubiquitous. Even when she's not present in the story, she is. Claire's status within the family allows her to be always present but not always acknowledged. She knows everything about the family. Even Agnes knows this when she says:

"Claire could tell us so much if she cared to, could you not, Claire. Claire, who watches from the sidelines, has seen so very much, has seen us all so clearly, have you not, Claire. You were not named for nothing." (Albee 81)

On Anges and Tobias

“Do we dislike happiness? 

We manufacture such a portion 

of our own despair…such busy folk.”

-Agnes

”You, who make all the decisions,

really rule the game.”

-Tobias

Agnes and Tobias are a very dynamic couple. While Agnes tries to maintain a balance and "keep shape," Tobias is one of the characters who directly threatens Agnes' desire. While Agnes is outspoken and frank, Tobias is quiet and seemingly unobservant. The couple puts on a show of having a strong relationship but throughout the play, cracks in their foundation are revealed. Bigsby accurately summarizes Agnes and Tobias' relationship:

“Agnes and Tobias are approaching sixty

and it is clear that they have evolved 
a workable relationship which,

while protecting them from obvious 
loneliness,equally clearly has left them 
fundamentally estranged from one another” (224). 

On A Delicate Balance

A Delicate Balance premiered in 1966 and won Albee a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1967. The play follows a middle-aged, upper-class couple, Agnes and Tobias, who struggle with Agnes' alcoholic sister, Claire, their daughter, Julia, who returns home after a fourth marriage, and their friends Edna and Harry, who arrive at their home and request shelter after fleeing an unnamed fear. All the while, Agnes and Tobias are trying to understand their own complex relationship.