- Jean: Are you telling me to go out and smell the roses?
- Cissy Robson: Oh no. We're telling you the roses are long gone. But the chrysanthemums are magnificent.
- Wilf Bond: I read somewhere that the average man thinks of sex every seven seconds.
- Reginald Paget: Do you?
- Wilf Bond: I wish, it was only every seven seconds.
- Dr. Lucy Cogan: [Showing a picture] This is Sir Thomas Beecham. He was one of Britain's greatest composers.
- Jean: Yes, I know who he was. He inherited a fortune. His grandfather made laxatives. Naming a nursing home after him is frighteningly apt.
- Reginald Paget: [to a class of teenagers] Opera is: when a guy's stabbed in the back, instead of bleeding, he sings. It seems to me, after much research, that rap is when a guy is stabbed in the back, and instead of bleeding, he talks. Er, rhythmically, even with feeling. But because rap's *spoken*, the feeling is sort of held in check: all on one note.
- Jean: Oh Reg, please, this is the first time we've seen each other in God knows how many years.
- Reginald Paget: Ninety-seven.
- Cissy Robson: [gasps] Is it really that long? God, how time flies.
- Cissy Robson: Jean... Jean, if you say yes, Cedric will give us the finale, instead of Anne Langley.
- Jean: Anne Langley!
- Cissy Robson: Yes.. yes, she wanted to sing Violetta... and she was, of course, a very fine Violetta...
- Jean: Oh pull yourself together, Cissy! Violetta's supposed to be dying of tuberculosis. She sounded as if she was singing Falstaff.
- Cissy Robson: Well, she's singing Tosca now.
- Jean: [Quietly, after a stunned pause] Over my dead body.
- Reginald Paget: Was that a yes?