- [on the train to Hull]
- Reynolds: Are you travelling to Hull?
- Sally Brown: Yes.
- Reynolds: Going back home?
- Sally Brown: Just for the weekend. How did you guess?
- Reynolds: Experience... plus instinct. People from Hull, they all have this mysterious northern mist behind their eyes.
- Sally Brown: You must be clever.
- Reynolds: Not really.
- Sally Brown: It takes a clever feller to talk rubbish like that.
- Reynolds: No, what it is, it's envy.
- Sally Brown: [ironically] Fancy.
- Reynolds: I've lived in about a dozen places. You get to envy people who know where home is.
- Sally Brown: "Promised Land", they call it.
- [telling Sally about the perils of being a skipper on a fishing trawler]
- Mike Thurlow: I could run the flaming boat on a sandbank ten minutes out of St Andrews. Or get iced up in the Arctic - down like a stone. Anything could happen. Worst thing of all could happen.
- Sally Brown: The worst thing?
- Mike Thurlow: The thing you don't get away with, no forgiveness - if you don't catch no fish. They'll let you run aground - there'll be no comeback if the charts are wrong or the fog's thick. Get knocked-off for poaching round Iceland - they'll maybe let you off. Lose the odd feller over the side - it makes no odds as long as there's a good story. They'll let you off if you sink with all hands - heroes, then, appeal funds. But you try coming home with no fish. Then see what happens.