- Prof. Walter Jameson: It's death that gives this world its point. We love a rose because we know it'll soon be gone. Whoever loved a stone?
- Professor Sam Kittridge: I thought if a man lived forever, he'd grow wiser. But that isn't true, is it?
- Prof. Walter Jameson: You just go on living, that's all.
- Narrator: [Closing Narration] Last stop on a long journey, as yet another human being returns to the vast nothingness that is the beginning and into the dust that is always the end.
- Narrator: [Opening Narration] You're looking at Act One, Scene One, of a nightmare, one not restricted to witching hours of dark, rainswept nights. Professor Walter Jameson, popular beyond words, who talks of the past as if it were the present, who conjures up the dead as if they were alive.
- Narrator: [continued opening narration after character dialogue] In the view of this man, Professor Samuel Kittridge, Walter Jameson has access to knowledge that couldn't come out of a volume of history, but rather from a book on black magic, which is to say that this nightmare begins at noon.
- Prof. Walter Jameson: [as he is aging rapidly after being shot] Nothing lasts forever. Thank God.
- [groans and collapses on the floor]
- Professor Sam Kittridge: I'll tell her!
- Prof. Walter Jameson: She won't believe you. Nobody would. You won't believe it yourself by tomorrow morning.
- Professor Sam Kittridge: [Walter reveals he is a man in a Civil War photograph] How old are you, Walter?
- Prof. Walter Jameson: You wouldn't believe me.
- Professor Sam Kittridge: I can believe anything now.
- Prof. Walter Jameson: All right. Let's say I'm old enough to have met this gentleman personally.
- [points to a marble bust of a Greek philosopher]
- Professor Sam Kittridge: Plato? But that was over two thousand years ago!