- Stanley Pilborough: I remember once my father, also a solicitor, said, "I have learnt never to judge any man from his behavior with money and the opposite sex". Yet it is my own saddened experience that those are the only ways to judge him.
- Stanley Pilborough: I expect good of nobody... and I'm sometimes pleasantly surprised. When I find good, my first feeling is one of nostalgia for something we've lost. Ask John Morgan...
- John Morgan: Well, I don't know. I only know goodness... and anger... and revenge and evil and desire. These seem to me far better words then 'neurosis' and 'psychology' and 'paranoia'. These old words, these good old words have a sort of... conviction... which all this modern apparatus of language now lacks. We bury these words, these simple feelings. We bury them deep. And all the building over that constitutes this century will not wish these feelings away.
- Roger Braithwaite: They say that murderers are drawn to the second-hand. There's a theory that murder is characteristically committed by people who handle other people's things... in second-hand clothes shops, junk shops, markets.
- Roger Braithwaite: Self improvement, that's another hallmark. People who teach themselves things at home, at night... theories they only half understand. Informal education- a fantasy life of singular intensity
- Stanley Pilborough: When you're a boy, you think oh it's so easy... always wipe the slate and move on. Then with the years you find you've become a prisoner of dreams.
- Jean Travers: The girl ran away this morning.
- Stanley Pilborough: Goodluck to her.
- Jean Travers: Yes. Goodluck.
- Stanley Pilborough: [raising a toast] To all our escapes.
- Jean Travers: [to her class] Today we address ourselves to the question: 'Is Shakespeare worth reading even though its only about kings?'
- Jean Travers: [Last lines in restaurant] A girl ran away this morning.
- Stanley Pilborough: Good luck to her.
- Jean Travers: [Pensively] Yes... good luck.
- Stanley Pilborough: [after a pause as a toast] To all our escapes.
- [the camera slowly dollies back]
- Mike Langdon: The problem is: no crime was being commited. Killing yourself is legal even in front of somebody else.
- Young Jean Travers: Hiding in the dark. Loving a man in the dark. Never knew any such happiness possible at all.
- Jean Travers: Please, don't go.
- Karen Creasy: You make an effort, you try and be nice, try and do anything. You just get your head chopped off. I try. Anyway... tell me; go on - tell me, since you're so clever, what did you do?
- Jean Travers: Oh, Karen.
- Karen Creasy: If it wasn't an accident. I'd love to know what you did.
- Jean Travers: Karen, Karen, come back.
- Marcia Pilborough: A hundred thousand years of human evolution. Brontosaurus, tyrannosaurus, man. And the sum ambition? Two up, two down in the west riding of Yorkshire. On a custom-built estate of brick and glass. That's not right. Is it?