- DC Endeavour Morse: There was a box in the boot of the car filled with stag films.
- Dr. Max DeBryn: Nature studies?
- DC Endeavour Morse: Not an antler in sight, I'm afraid.
- Felix Lorimer: [recalling the end of Morse's student career] That last term, you were a thing altogether pitiable.
- Felix Lorimer: You ever think of picking up your degree?
- DC Endeavour Morse: Oh, no. Like innocence and hope for mankind, I number it now amongst the lost things.
- Felix Lorimer: Pity.
- DI Fred Thursday: If Bernie Waters has made a complaint, someone put him up to it. He hasn't got the brains to blow his own wig off.
- DC Endeavour Morse: [after Thursday has returned from a gangster funeral] How'd it go?
- DI Fred Thursday: [coughing badly because of his lung wound] You know what they say about funerals. There's always someone catches his death.
- DC Endeavour Morse: [discovering that the pornographic films in the dead man's car have titles parodying those of theatrical masterworks] Only in Oxford!
- DS Jim Strange: Miss Frazil.
- DI Fred Thursday: Friends or family?
- Dorothea Frazil: The King is dead. Long live the King.
- DI Fred Thursday: Harry Rose was a lot of things, but royalty wasn't one of them.
- Dorothea Frazil: Nature abhors a vacuum.
- DC Endeavour Morse: [to Felix Lorimer] Is there something you wanted to talk to me about? You didn't invite me here just to kick through the leaves.
- Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright: [cautioning Thursday against violence] There'll be no room in Thames Valley for... outdated methods.
- Peter Matthews: [during the siege] We were never going home, were we?
- Cole Matthews: No. It was life from the second the boy took a pop at a copper.
- DS Jim Strange: [as Max arrives at the crime scene] Where are you going?
- Dr. Max DeBryn: [determined] You're not the only one who took an oath!
- DS Jim Strange: Bless you, doc - but I can't let you go.
- Dr. Max DeBryn: [bristling] Let me? You do your job - I'll do mine!
- DS Jim Strange: If they've made good on their threat, we're going to need you for after, to make it stick. Please, doc - if anything happened to you, Mr. Bright would have my guts.
- DC Endeavour Morse: [returning to his old college] Coming through the quad, it's hard to believe I was ever here at all.
- Felix Lorimer: It was funny, seeing you coming, through the window. You had that same look on your face the first time I ever saw you.
- DC Endeavour Morse: What look's that?
- Felix Lorimer: Oh... Nervous, shy, hopeful.
- DC Endeavour Morse: Yes, I suppose I was all of those things. Frightened, mostly - that's my abiding memory.
- Felix Lorimer: Of what?
- DC Endeavour Morse: Of being found out.
- Howard Fordyce: [reprimanding Joan as she returns late from lunch] It's a lunch HOUR, Miss Thursday.
- Joan Thursday: I'm sorry, Mr. Fordyce, I'll make it up.
- Howard Fordyce: Indeed you will, Miss Thursday. This is a bank, not a social club.
- Jerome Hogg: [about his departing student, Randall] A lover of oysters, I'm afraid, for all my blandishments.
- Dr. Max DeBryn: Now, what's all this about a sergeant's exam? Pastures new?
- DC Endeavour Morse: How's that?
- Dr. Max DeBryn: There's not going to be enough room for two sergeants at Cowley, is there?
- WPC Shirley Trewlove: [after Thursday's suspension] What is going on upstairs with Inspector Thursday?
- DC Endeavour Morse: Why, what have you heard?
- WPC Shirley Trewlove: That he leaned on someone a little too heavily. At least, that's the word around the canteen.
- DC Endeavour Morse: The canteen? I wouldn't trust the spotted dick in that place, let alone anything else.
- DI Fred Thursday: [on the telephone to Cole Matthews] Now listen to me, Cole. You let the staff and the customers go now and that's that. The law takes its course.
- Cole Matthews: Say we don't?
- DI Fred Thursday: Then I'll put you in the ground.
- Cole Matthews: [jeeringly, because he knows of Thursday's lung wound] Ooooh! Big talk for a lung-er!
- DI Fred Thursday: I'm a lung-er, all right. The doc's given me three weeks.
- Cole Matthews: Bad luck for you.
- DI Fred Thursday: Bad luck for both of us.
- Cole Matthews: How's that?
- DI Fred Thursday: I can go in my bed, with posterity solemn round. Or I can go standing toe-to-toe with you. I know which I'd sooner.
- DC Endeavour Morse: If you gun down a senior police officer in cold blood, they'll hunt you down to the end of your days, that's all!