- Hawkins: [to three lady musicians playing in the lounge of the "Green Man" inn] Ladies! I've never heard a trio play with such brio! And, after that perfectly-judged andantino, perhaps you'd join me in a little vino?
- [Reginald Willoughby-Cruft is a pompous BBC radio announcer. He has discovered vacuum-cleaner salesman William Blake in various compromising situations with his fiancée]
- Reginald Willoughby-Cruft: [to William Blake] By heaven! I'd thrash the life out of you... if I didn't have to read the nine-o'clock news.
- Ann Vincent: He wasn't the real Mr. Bostock, of course, because the real Mr. Bostock would be Mrs. Bostock's husband, if she had one alive. Which naturally, we don't know because we've never met her. But she might have. In which case, there would be two of them, but only one real one.
- Reginald Willoughby-Cruft: I really can't bring myself to ask you to say that all over again, Ann.
- Ann Vincent: How do you know she was murdered?
- William Blake: Well, people don't usually commit suicide in a boudoir grand.
- Hawkins: [to McKechnie] It's that fearsome combination of eager beaver and Scots non-conformist that makes your company so hard to bear, Angus.
- Lily: Charlie!
- Charles Boughtflower: Lily! How's my beautiful girl?
- Lily: I'd almost given you up.
- Charles Boughtflower: Had a lot of trouble getting away.
- [Of his new car]
- Charles Boughtflower: What do you think of her. Smashing little barrow, eh?
- Lily: Ooh, it's lovely isn't it?
- Charles Boughtflower: Yeah, I told the Memsa'ab I was taking it down to Walton-on-the-Naze to show a customer.
- Lily: Oh, did she believe you?
- Charles Boughtflower: Well, hard to say. Though she's been behaving very mysteriously lately.
- Lily: How do you mean?
- Charles Boughtflower: Well, you know, pools of silence broken only by the odd vitriolic ripple.
- Radio Announcer: This is the BBC Home Service. "Five Minutes of Free Verse".
- William Blake: We can do without that.
- Radio Announcer: Here is Reginald Willoughby-Cruft who will read a group of poems by Milton Boyle entitled "Vicious Cycle."
- Reginald Willoughby-Cruft: "Her beauty has a kind of ugliness, a strangulated loveliness, compressing the jugular of my sensitivity as ivy tourniquets trunk of tree turning the arboreal royalty into beanpole servitors. Burying the berries in a fruitless operation so that the name of her - Ann... Ann... Asininely monosyllabic. The mere label she goes by. Yet pulsing with a drum beat. Ann - Ann - Ann - Ann!" Ann, I can't go on. Listen to me, wherever you are. You can go to your blasted vacuum cleaner. I'm through. Through, through, through, through...
- Radio Announcer: We must apologise to listeners for a slight technical hitch. And that brings us to the end of broadcasting for tonight. Goodnight, everybody. Goodnight.
- [first lines]
- Hawkins: Ah! School days. The happiest days of one's life. I was a carefree innocent lad in those far off times. Only one thing clouded my youthful spirits: my abominable headmaster. Really, all I did was to put an electric charge in his fountain pen and an explosive in the inkpot. I honestly only intended to humiliate him. However, that got rid of him, and it also disposed of any doubts I may have had about my true vocation.
- Sir Gregory Upshott: Let's see what they have to offer, I really have quite an appetite.
- [Reading the menu]
- Sir Gregory Upshott: What's this, Brown Windsor soup and what, chop toad? Chop toad, I ask you, is there any other country in the world that would attempt to start the gastric juices flowing with those repellent words "chop toad"? We really are a most extraordinary nation. I see you have gallantine of chicken.
- Waiter: Yes sir.
- Sir Gregory Upshott: More gallantine than chicken I've no doubt.
- Waiter: Yes sir.
- Sir Gregory Upshott: Well, I'll take a chance. What about you my dear?
- Joan Wood: I'd like the chop toad please.
- Lily: [fending off Charlie Boughtflower's amorous attentions - but not too hard] Oh, Charlie, you are dreadful!