- Charlie: We always kept our sexual sights impossibly high: it preserved us from the stigma of attempt and failure, on the one hand, and success and mortal sin on the other.
- Drumm: You'll amount to nothing until you learn to say "No." "No" to jobs, "no" to girls, "no" to money. Otherwise, by the time you've learned to say "no" to life, you'll find you've swallowed half of it.
- Charlie: All those years you sat and looked into the fire, what went through your head? What did you think of? I never knew you to have a hope or a dream or to say a half wise thing!
- Drumm: The dangerous ones are those who amuse us. There are millions like him- inoffensive, stupid, and not a damn bit of good. They've never said "No" in their lives or to their lives, and they'd cheerfully see the rest of us buried. If you have any sense, you'll learn to be frightened of him.
- Charlie: [to his father's ghost] You worked for 58 years, 9 hours a day, in a garden so steep a horse couldn't climb it. And when they let you go, with a pension of 10 shillings a week, you did handsprings of joy because it came from "The Quality." You spent your life sitting on brambles, and wouldn't move in case someone took your seat.