“Why do I have a sense of impending disaster?(He reflects) Sonders is after my niece and has discovered the secret address where I am sending her to the safe keeping of my sister-in-law Miss Blumenblatt, who has never laid eyes on him, or, for that matter, on Marie either since she was a baby—while I have to leave my business in the charge of my assistant and an apprentice, and follow my new servant, whom I haven't had time to introduce to anyone, to town to join the parade and take my fiancée to dinner in a uniform I can't sit down in.One false move and we could have a farce on our hands.”

“LADY CROOM: ....My lake is drained to a ditch for no purpose I can understand, unless it be that snipe and curlew have deserted three counties so that they may be shot in our swamp. What you painted as forest is a mean plantation, your greenery is mud, your waterfall is wet mud, and your mount is an opencast mine for the mud that was lacking in the dell. (Pointing through the window) What is that cowshed?NOAKES: The hermitage, my lady?LADY CROOM: It is a cowshed.NOAKES: It is, I assure you, a very habitable cottage, properly founded and drained, two rooms and a closet under a slate roof and a stone chimney --LADY CROOM: And who is to live in it?NOAKES: Why, the hermit.LADY CROOM: Where is he?NOAKES: Madam?LADY CROOM: You surely do not supply an hermitage without a hermit?NOAKES: Indeed, madam --LADY CROOM: Come, come, Mr Noakes. If I am promised a fountain I expect it to come with water. What hermits do you have?NOAKES: I have no hermits, my lady.LADY CROOM: Not one? I am speechless.NOAKES: I am sure a hermit can be found. One could advertise.LADY CROOM: Advertise?NOAKES: In the newspapers.LADY CROOM: But surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence.”

“Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.”

“I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.”

“SEPTIMUS: My lady, I was alone with my thoughts in the gazebo, when Mrs Chater ran me to ground, and I being in such a passion, in an agony of unrelieved desire --LADY CROOM: Oh....!SEPTIMUS: -- I thought in my madness that the Chater with her skirts over her head would give me the momentary illusion of the happiness to which I dared not put a face.(Pause.)LADY CROOM: I do not know when I have received a more unusual compliment, Mr Hodge. I hope I am more than a match for Mrs Chater with her head in a bucket. Does she wear drawers?SEPTIMUS: She does.LADY CROOM: Yes, I have heard that drawers are being worn now. It is unnatural for women to be got up like jockeys. I cannot approve.”

“I should have the courage of my lack of convictions.”

“I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.”