- Detective Sergeant Lewis: You ought to get off home. You look done in.
- Chief Inspector Morse: [Depressed] I am... done in.
- Chief Inspector Morse: [He puts down his pen and sighs] Art and life, Lewis. Art and life.
- Detective Sergeant Lewis: Oh, yeah?
- Chief Inspector Morse: Always preferred art myself. Don't know about life. And when I meet people like Baydon, I'm not that sorry but... Today, I suppose because I've always thought art was... because it gave me so much... I've always thought of artists as... as being something different.
- Detective Sergeant Lewis: My dad used to love football - but he didn't like footballers. You have to keep the people that do things apart from what they do. That's what he said.
- Chief Inspector Morse: Allowing the pages of The Sun to pass before your eyes does not amount to reading, Lewis.
- Chief Inspector Morse: Better drag the river, I suppose. You know, it would be nice to enjoy the Isis once in a while, instead of having to fish bodies out of it.
- Detective Sergeant Lewis: You're not suffering job stress, are you, Sir?
- Librarian: Inspector, it's lunchtime. A lot of people are getting hungry.
- Chief Inspector Morse: Send out for sandwiches.
- Librarian: [Officiously] This is a library. Eating is strictly forbidden! If you're a graduate of the university, I would have thought you would have known that.
- Chief Inspector Morse: [Annoyed] Oh, then, you'll just have to wait until the officer in charge says you can go out.
- Mrs. Thompson: He lives over there somewhere.
- [Realizing she may be casting suspicion]
- Mrs. Thompson: But I didn't mean... I hope you don't think that I wa...
- Detective Sergeant Lewis: I never think, Ma'm. sergeants aren't allowed to - not in Thames Valley.
- Mrs. Thompson: Hunnh?
- Lord Hinksey: [to the Vice-Chancellor] Go on, Go on! What's the point of high office if you can't use your influence?
- Chief Inspector Morse: [to Lewis, referring to where the shot came from] Why then, it must be the library, but why choose a place notorious for silence to fire a shot?
- Lord Hinksey: [referring to honorary doctorates] You know, however many you've got, they do die with you.
- Andrew Baydon: I think I can live with that.
- Andrew Baydon: [Referring to Morse] Is that knob-head still here?
- Helen Buscott, Baydon's secretary: Which one?
- Andrew Baydon: That superannuated policeman with the scrap-heap of a car.
- Helen Buscott, Baydon's secretary: The Secretary of State wonders if you can spare a word.
- Andrew Baydon: Knobhead! That's a word I can spare - knobhead!
- Chief Inspector Morse: [Discussing Andrew Braydon's decision to become a WWII prison camp guard] Why did you go to the fascists in the camp?
- Andrew Baydon: You English. You have led such a sheltered English life. Oxford, a dream town. But there
- [the camp]
- Andrew Baydon: it was worse than any nightmare you could
- [imagine]
- Andrew Baydon: Life or death every minute of the day. My life or yours. Can you understand that! Knobhead? But even here, in Oxford,-if you had to decide, I kill you or you kill me, which way would you go?
- Chief Inspector Morse: I don't know.
- Andrew Baydon: Then, you would die.