How we cite our quotes: All quotations are from Citizen Cane.
Quote #7
SUSAN: They haven't been tough on me. I just lost my money. But when I compare these last ten years with the twenty I spent with him—
Thompson thinks that times have been tough on Susan Alexander because she lost her entire fortune. But she doesn't seem to mind it all too much. In her mind, the worst years of her life (with Kane) were also the richest, so there's not much of a connection between money and happiness for her.
Quote #8
ASSISTANT: "Venus," Fourth Century. Acquired 1911. Cost twenty-three thousand. […] That's a lot of money to pay for a dame without a head.
It's not quite clear why Kane spent so much of his money acquiring art. But when he dies and movers start packing up his stuff, they think it's all just a waste of money because none of it is practical. It's almost as if Kane spent his life trying to buy an object that he never managed to find… like Rosebud.
Quote #9
NARRATOR: How, to boarding housekeeper Mary Kane, by a defaulting boarder, in 1868 was left the supposedly worthless deed to an abandoned mineshaft: the Colorado Lode.
We learn that Charles Kane inherited his great fortune from his mother, who was given a supposedly worthless Colorado mine by a person trying to pay off his boarding debt. Well the mine turns out to be worth a ton of money, and Charles' mother thinks she's doing the right thing by sending him away so he can be raised with a good education. The problem is that in the process, she deprives him of the love that a growing child needs.