- James Kavanagh QC: [Comforting] It's not too late.
- Eleanor Harker QC: You're very sweet. Who'd have me now. Look at me... bleary-eyed old baggage... half cat, half a mortgage... half a life.
- James Kavanagh QC: [to Eleanor] When you were a girl, I'll bet that the boys that you liked could be told by the bruises on their arms.
- Eleanor Harker QC: My dear, while you breathe, the Age of Chivalry is not yet past.
- James Kavanagh QC: Guilty as charged.
- Peter Foxcott QC: Don't sacrifice real life on the altar of career.
- Julia Piper: I thought career was real life.
- Peter Foxcott QC: Real life? I prosecuted a boy the other week... fifteen... one of four children, each with a different father. He'd murdered the youngest... terrible case, but as he stood there in the dock, shoulders hunched against the sentence, I suddenly realized this shabby, venal, malnourished scrap of humanity had experienced more in his fifteen summers...
- [He closes his eyes in pain]
- Peter Foxcott QC: . You understand? He was more alive than I should ever be.