Ask a Year 11 to name a quote from An Inspector Calls and almost everyone gives you the same one: "millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths." It's a good quote — the anaphora is obvious, the point about class is obvious, and it's been on every revision poster in the country since the play went on the specification. But it's also the reason two quotes that sit right next to it in the text get overlooked completely, and they're arguably the two an examiner is more pleased to see, precisely because fewer students bring them.

Here they are, why they matter more than their fame suggests, and how to actually use them instead of just dropping them in.

Quote 1: "the Titanic — she sails next week... and unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable"

This line does almost all of its work before the Inspector has even arrived. Birling delivers it in Act One, mid-flow, showing off to Gerald about progress, prosperity, and his own judgement — and every word of it is wrong. The ship that's "absolutely unsinkable" sinks on her maiden voyage, a few months after the scene is set. Priestley's 1945 audience knew that. They also knew what came after it: two world wars that Birling, in the same speech, confidently rules out.

That's dramatic irony doing exactly what dramatic irony is for — not just "the audience knows something the character doesn't," but a specific collapse of authority. Birling has just spent a page establishing himself as a man whose opinions are worth taking seriously (a magistrate, a man "talking as a hard-headed businessman"), and Priestley detonates that authority in a single line before the play's actual argument has even started. Everything Birling says for the rest of the play — that the Inspector is a fraud, that a strike is impossible, that "a man has to look after himself" — is coloured by the fact that we already know his judgement is worthless. You don't need to wait for the Inspector to discredit Birling. Priestley already has.

Why it gets missed: it arrives early, before anything "dramatic" has happened, so it doesn't feel like a quote worth remembering. Students are trained to hunt for quotes near the emotional peaks — the Inspector's speeches, Sheila's confession — and skip past the small-talk scene that opens the play. That's exactly backwards. The Titanic line is doing structural work that pays off for the rest of the text.

Quote 2: "Each of you helped to kill her. Remember that. Never forget it."

This is the Inspector's thesis statement, and it's easy to miss precisely because it sits one breath away from the far more famous "millions of Eva Smiths" speech — students remember the poetic line and skip the blunt one right next to it.

Where the "millions" quote makes Eva Smith symbolic (she stands for an entire class), this line does the opposite: it makes the guilt individual and collective at the same time. "Each of you" refuses any Birling the option of hiding behind the others — Sheila can't say Eric's crime was worse, and Birling can't say his was smaller. Then Priestley strips the sentence down to almost nothing: three short imperatives, no metaphor, no adjective doing the work for him. "Remember that. Never forget it." reads like moral law, not persuasion. It's the most direct statement in the entire play of what the Inspector — and Priestley — actually believes: that responsibility for another person's suffering cannot be divided up and reduced until it disappears.

That bluntness is also the point that unlocks AO2 for this quote: after ninety minutes of characters using language to evade responsibility ("she was one of my employees... that's all," "girls of that class—"), the Inspector refuses to let language do any evasive work at all. The short, declarative sentences are a technique in themselves — a deliberate rejection of the euphemism the Birlings have used all play.

How to actually use both quotes in a paragraph — not just drop them in

The mistake students make with strong quotes isn't picking the wrong one, it's treating the quote as the finish line instead of the starting point. A quote dropped in with no technique, no effect, and no link back to the question earns almost nothing under AO2, however well chosen it is.

Here's the shape that gets marks, using the Titanic quote as the example:

• Point: Priestley discredits Birling's authority before the play's central argument even begins.
• Evidence: "the Titanic... unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable."
• Technique: dramatic irony, reinforced by the repeated intensifier ("absolutely") that pushes his confidence to a comic, almost boastful extreme.
• Analysis: the audience's hindsight converts Birling's certainty into evidence against him — every subsequent claim he makes is pre-discredited by this one.
• Link: this sets up Priestley's wider argument about class complacency for a 1945 audience who had lived through the consequences of exactly that kind of overconfidence — the play's socialist message depends on the audience distrusting Birling from minute one.

Do the same with "each of you helped to kill her" and the AO3 link becomes the play's cyclical structure and its collectivist message: the Inspector's accusation is answered, almost word for word, by the final telephone call — the guilt he names doesn't go away just because the Birlings would like it to.

Why the famous line isn't enough on its own

"Millions and millions of Eva Smiths" is a genuinely strong quote, and there's nothing wrong with using it. The problem is what happens when it's the only quote a student has for the play's central theme — it makes Eva Smith abstract, a symbol representing an entire class, but it says nothing about individual guilt, and nothing about the specific mechanism (dramatic irony, structural placement) Priestley uses to build the case against each Birling by name. An essay that leans on the "millions" quote alone tends to argue that the play is about social responsibility in general. An essay that also has the Titanic line and "each of you helped to kill her" can argue how — irony that discredits the old guard, and a direct, individual accusation that collective guilt can't be diluted away. That's the difference between a solid AO1 point and a top-band AO1 point with AO2 doing real work underneath it.

Both of these quotes, along with the full theme-by-theme breakdown — social responsibility, class, gender, generational conflict, blame, power, Sheila's arc, and the Inspector's dramatic function, each with AO1 arguments, AO2 technique analysis, and AO3 context — are in FlowForge's An Inspector Calls essay plans. You can find them in the shop.