- DI Fred Thursday: [dismissing the incompetence of the County Police] County couldn't find its arse with both hands and a map!
- Dorothea Frazil: What's this, girl trouble?
- DC Endeavour Morse: I haven't got a girl.
- Dorothea Frazil: Maybe that's the trouble.
- Dr. Max DeBryn: [asked for "time of death" for the newly-discovered corpse] Two thousand years ago.
- DS Jim Strange: [surprised] Two thousand years?
- Dr. Max DeBryn: Yes. Give or take a couple of hundred years.
- DS Jim Strange: We'll have trouble notifying next of kin.
- Joan Thursday: [after her father has found her] I suppose Morse told you. I asked him not to. Gave me his word.
- DI Fred Thursday: He kept it.
- DC Endeavour Morse: [interviewing Dowsable Chattox about the long-missing Dr. Laxman] So why did he end up with a Tarot card in his pocket?
- Dowsable Chattox: I did a reading for him. And he took it.
- DC Endeavour Morse: That doesn't seem a particularly nice thing to do.
- Dowsable Chattox: He wasn't nice.
- DC Endeavour Morse: So - what? - he just did it out of mischief?
- Dowsable Chattox: More spite. Perhaps he didn't like what the cards had to say. Maybe he spoiled the pack because he thought he could change his future.
- DC Endeavour Morse: Why? What did the cards predict?
- Dowsable Chattox: That a woman would bring him to ruin.
- Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright: [returning to work from hospital and finding a corpse has been discovered] Well, there we are. Not half an hour in the station, all back to normal. Carry on.
- DC Endeavour Morse: [finding Dowsable Chattox's cottage door unlocked and going in] Hello? Miss Chattox? Hello? Hello? My name's...
- [he suddenly realizes that Dowsable, whom he has never met before, has appeared , holding a double-barrelled rifle on him]
- DC Endeavour Morse: .
- Dowsable Chattox: Morse. That's your name, isn't it? Morse. I been expecting you.
- DI Fred Thursday: [confronting his daughter's married lover] If you ever see her again, I'll fit you up for a nonce and have you in chokey so fast you won't know what hit you!
- Elliott Blake: [showing Morse around the nuclear facility] Early work here enabled Britain to take its rightful place at the atomic table.
- DC Endeavour Morse: [unimpressed] Keeping up with Uncle Sam?
- Elliott Blake: And Uncle Joe.
- DI Fred Thursday: [a corpse has been discovered] Is it him?
- Dr. Max DeBryn: Most certainly. I could recite his dental record from memory. It's Matthew Laxman, no question.
- DI Fred Thursday: Cause?
- Dr. Max DeBryn: There's a wound to the skull, not unlike the other one you pulled out of the bog. Now, at some point, he was exposed to a fairly high level of radiation.
- DI Fred Thursday: Enough to be fatal?
- Dr. Max DeBryn: Enough that I'll be ordering him a lead-lined coffin.
- Dowsable Chattox: There are things in the world older than we know. We come and go, but the land endures.
- DC Endeavour Morse: Evening, sir. I wondered if you had a moment. It's about my sergeant's exam. I've been thinking about what you said. About me leaving Oxford. You're right, there's nothing to keep me here. No family. I've been offered to join a new unit in London. It means rank.
- Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright: Well... It goes without saying, we shall miss your abilities, but... you must do what you think right. For an officer of your talent to remain at detective constable would be a waste of material. Believe me, Morse, I've seen it all too often. Better men passed over in favour of mediocrity because they weren't... clubbable.
- DC Endeavour Morse: So you think I should take it?
- Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright: That's a matter entirely for you. If you'll forgive the presumption, you're a man, I think, more used to putting the concerns of others before himself. Perhaps in this instance, you should consider what's in your own best interests.
- Win Thursday: [chastising her husband for his seeming indifference to Joan's disappearance] Police! When it comes to murder, you can find a needle in a haystack. But when it's your own daughter...
- Joan Thursday: How's Mum?
- DI Fred Thursday: Half out of her mind with worry. You could have called just to set her mind at rest.
- Joan Thursday: I couldn't. She'd have got around me.
- DI Fred Thursday: Would that have been the end of the world?
- Joan Thursday: See? That's why I had to go. If I come home, what then? Back to the nine to five? Tea in front of the telly, the Saturday dates with some nice boy who won't try and put his hand up my skirt.
- DI Fred Thursday: Joan.
- Joan Thursday: Is that what you want me to be? The engagement party, Uncle Charlie's blue jokes at the wedding, two-up two-down on some new estate, every house the same, with a pram in the hall?
- DI Fred Thursday: Why not? We'd have been glad of something like that, your mother and me. You're too young to remember but... our first two years of married life after I'd come back from the war, we lived with your nan and granddad over the ironmonger's. Moved into the prefab, we thought we'd won the pools.
- Joan Thursday: I'm not you and Mum. And it's not your life, it's mine.
- DI Fred Thursday: I'm her father.
- Ray Morton: Right. Pleased to meet you. Do you want me to come back?
- Joan Thursday: Take no notice. He's just leaving.
- DI Fred Thursday: I'm not done here.
- Ray Morton: Oh, I think you are, mate.
- DI Fred Thursday: Is this really what you want? Well... You've made your bed.
- [Door slams]
- Professor Donald Bagley: I'm afraid I have no idea what Matthew would have wanted with a Geiger counter.
- DI Fred Thursday: Really? He never discussed it with you? He never mentioned the power station?
- Professor Donald Bagley: He wouldn't have. He knew better. Having been midwife to the devil, Bramford's rather a sore point with me.
- DI Fred Thursday: Progress, sir.
- Professor Donald Bagley: Oh. Yes, you think so? Well, I suppose I did, too.
- Dorothea Frazil: All well? You seem a little out of sorts.
- DC Endeavour Morse: My flat was burgled.
- Dorothea Frazil: Bad luck.
- DC Endeavour Morse: Maybe. Maybe someone's trying to tell me something.
- Dorothea Frazil: Like what?
- DC Endeavour Morse: Go west, young man. Or south. London, maybe. A man might lose himself there.
- Dorothea Frazil: You want to be lost?
- Professor Donald Bagley: Scientists! We're just children playing with matches - and for what? To find more efficient ways of turning our fellow human beings into ash!
- Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright: [reading the whitewashed account in the "Oxford Mail" of the incident at the nuclear power station] "A small fire in a storage area was quickly contained by Bramford's own fire brigade, with the site suffering only the most minor damage. No member of staff was injured and there was never, at any time, a danger to the public".
- DI Fred Thursday: [sarcastic] And they all lived happily ever after.
- Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright: In the "Mail", Thursday. I hope you wouldn't gainsay Miss Frazil.
- DI Fred Thursday: More than my life's worth, sir.
- DI Fred Thursday: [when a dog barks repeatedly] He's a bit like our Chief Superintendent, I expect. Bark's worse than his bite.
- Elliott Blake: [about Professor Bagley] Bramford probably wouldn't have existed without him. Professor Bagley proved vital to Britain's efforts in developing its own nuclear capability. Before he lost his way, of course.
- DC Endeavour Morse: How's that?
- Elliott Blake: His wife was with him at Rumera in the Montebello Islands for the first British nuclear tests. Later, she developed a particularly aggressive leukaemia.
- DC Endeavour Morse: And Bagley blamed himself?
- Elliott Blake: When she died, he recanted his admiration for atomic energy - disavowed his achievements.
- Dorothea Frazil: That's understandable, in the circumstances.
- Elliott Blake: Perhaps. But one can't disinvent the wheel.
- Alison Laxman: [describing her husband] He was passionate - driven, even, in his work, in politics. He had a temper, in drink. Sometimes, I felt there was a side to his life that I didn't know at all.
- Dowsable Chattox: [to Seth] You want to keep away from the Bergers - him and her both. There's nothing up there for the likes of us. Hear me?