- Captain Homer Jackson: All right. Jus' gonna settle with Duggan my way.
- Long Susan: You'll not settle anything with Duggan.
- Captain Homer Jackson: Oh, tell me Susan, huh. You tell me what to do. Tell me how I'm supposed to help you, 'cause you kept this goddam thing a secret. Now the son of a bitch is turning the screw. All I wanted was you and me.
- Long Susan: Don't.
- Captain Homer Jackson: Shoulda done this from the start.
- Long Susan: You don't know him.
- Captain Homer Jackson: He's about to know me.
- Captain Homer Jackson: [as Susan enters] You're beautiful!
- Long Susan: You're drunk.
- Captain Homer Jackson: I thought of it before I was drunk, and I'll think of it after I'm dead.
- Solomon Quint: [after confessing his love for the telegraph boy] You must think me a bloody fool, sir.
- James Self: I do not pretend to understand these things.
- Detective Inspector Edmund Reid: [to Drake] I begin to think a law that makes a crime of human love will police itself... in pure... despair.
- James Self: [to Reid] Do you understand, lawman? The only goodness I may achieve in this wretched life will be the timely leaving of it.
- Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake: The Inspector was turning all philosophical on me. Gave me an 'eadache.
- Bella Drake: We'll have words. Can't have him wearing out that noggin.
- Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake: The law's the law, right?
- Bella Drake: And policemen serve it.
- Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake: We don't ask all the whys and wherefores, do we? Otherwise...
- Bella Drake: Well, what then?
- Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake: But the Inspector, when it comes to banging up poofs and Mary Anns... To see him, he's a man all scooped of belief.
- Bella Drake: Do you believe in it?
- Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake: Hell's bells. Not you, too?
- Bella Drake: Maybe he just understands what it is to be lonely. Say a law was made tomorrow... for you to love me was a crime. They say it's filthy and unnatural. Would you stop, Bennet? Turn off your love like a gas tap, just to obey?
- Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake: I'd be the filthiest scofflaw this land had ever seen.
- [they kiss]
- Detective Inspector Edmund Reid: Miss Cobden. I hope you'll excuse the hour.
- Jane Cobden: It is excused, Inspector.
- Detective Inspector Edmund Reid: You see, I... I have of late had cause for reflection.
- Jane Cobden: Would you care to sit? Or would you prefer to share the results of your ruminations from the threshold?
- Detective Inspector Edmund Reid: It is a rare thing to find a friend in this world, a true friend. Rarer still one that might become more. There are some that do however and risk all for it. And even though the world in all its might might seek to snuff out their love, they burn with it, fierce and bright like the sun. The love that I have known, the strength needed of me was not there. I failed... I failed my wife, Miss Cobden. I would not have that pain visited upon you. You said the past was naught but black magnetism, if I allowed you would help me resist it. I have had enough of the darkness, if you would help me know the sun.
- Jane Cobden: Well, Edmund.
- [pauses]
- Jane Cobden: I do hope you're not going to launch into sonnets every time you wish to take me for dinner and a dance? I would find all the swooning quite tiresome.
- Franklin Stone: ...love and justice are not the primal forces of our world, sir; Gold is the primal force of our world.