- Steven Holte: Artists are better off dead.
- Karen McIver: Why?
- Steven Holte: People pay more attention to them when they're dead. That's what's so troublesome.
- Karen McIver: Is that what you are, a painter?
- Steven Holte: They said Van Gogh was crazy because he killed himself. He couldn't sell a painting while he was alive, and now they're worth thirty million dollars. They weren't that bad then and they're not that good now, so who's crazy?
- Steven Holte: Red and green. Derain died last fall in a hospital. You wouldn't know who he was.
- Karen McIver: It happens I do.
- Steven Holte: Who?
- Karen McIver: A French painter. One of les Fauves.
- Steven Holte: He died in a hospital in a white bed in a white room, doctors in white standing around. The last thing he said was, "Some red, show me some red. Before dying, I want to see some red with some green."
- Steven Holte: Everybody's tilted here. That's why you didn't know who I was. You can't tell the patients from the doctors.
- Karen McIver: Oh, but I can.
- Steven Holte: How?
- Karen McIver: The patients get better!
- Dr. Douglas N. Devanal: Karen, we ought to put you in the bank and live off the interest. You look like a million dollars.
- Steven Holte: You're still supposed to be making me fit for normal life! What's normal? Yours? If it's a question of values, your values stink! Lousy, middle-class, well-fed, smug existence. All you care about is a paycheck you didn't earn and a beautiful thing to go home to every night. "Stewart, darling! Welcome home! There's a fatted calf on the stove!"
- Karen McIver: What am I supposed to be doing?
- Dr. Stewart 'Mac' McIver: You're not supposed to be showing yourself off to my patients!
- Karen McIver: Give me one ounce of the attention you give them day and night!
- Dr. Stewart 'Mac' McIver: Now, what does that mean?
- Karen McIver: Just what you think it means!
- Dr. Stewart 'Mac' McIver: Oh, I see. You've been encouraging Dev by weeping on his shoulder.
- Karen McIver: I don't weep.
- Victoria Inch: Do you think we could - get along better together?
- Dr. Stewart 'Mac' McIver: Why, sure, Vicky. My terms are simple: unconditional surrender.
- Dr. Stewart 'Mac' McIver: What does that mean - that I'm neglecting the kids, too?
- Karen McIver: Yes, the only ones who get anything real from you are those professional children out at the clinic. Yesterday in school, they asked Rosie what she wanted to be when she grew up. Would you like to know what she answered? A patient!
- Dr. Stewart 'Mac' McIver: You all know what's happened. None of it can be undone. But what we can do is learn from it. Out of our needs and our passions here, we've - we've spun a human cobweb.
- Steven Holte: You talk a lot, don't you?
- Karen McIver: Don't you, ever?
- Steven Holte: I could talk your eyes out of your head.
- Steven Holte: I get out here.
- Karen McIver: You're from the clinic?
- Steven Holte: That's right. I'm - out of touch with reality.
- Steven Holte: Well, there it is. The House of Usher. They talk of environmental therapy. Some environment! You should see the inside. Like the inside of a dead fish!
- Steven Holte: Your wife, who, looks as if anybody breathed on her she'd break out in a thick frost! What is she? A nymphomaniac or something? What did you marry her for, anyway? To wear on your lapel?
- Mr. Capp: Ah! The Cezanne of the psychos! This is your moment! Make the most of it. You're on the assembly line of success. From now on, you'll hover between exhilaration and despair. I pity you. For a few moments of elation, a mass of inflamed nerve ends!
- Mr. Appleton: Gibbon captured it magnificently in his decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but he missed the delicious irony to be found in the pattern of the Caesars. Now, granted, Caligula was a beast - cruel, cunning, and licentious. Nevertheless...
- Meg Faversen Rinehart: My mother did her loving best to ruin me. I fooled her, though. Got over it. Withstood it, anyway.
- Steven Holte: How?
- Meg Faversen Rinehart: Got analyzed. Now, I'm perfect.
- Steven Holte: You mean people - get better?
- Meg Faversen Rinehart: It helps, if you work at it. Now, beat it.
- Dr. Douglas N. Devanal: Unwanted? How could you feel that? I've never given you that feeling, have I, Karen?
- Dr. Douglas N. Devanal: Marriage is a funny business, Karen. You can starve for something you don't get in it. Oh, it's a great institution but, like all institutions, something of the individual gets lost in it. So, either we starve or we look for it outside.
- Dr. Stewart 'Mac' McIver: I hate to break into your little dream, Karen, but you're not exactly a unique event in Dr. Devanal's life. It happens with every woman he meets.
- Dr. Stewart 'Mac' McIver: Don't ever hang up on me like that again, Vicky. And if you do, I'll pull your dress over your head and beat some manners into you.
- Victoria Inch: You wouldn't dare!
- Dr. Stewart 'Mac' McIver: Dare me.
- Victoria Inch: This house and the ground it stands on is my property. I've asked you to leave and you're trespassing.
- Dr. Stewart 'Mac' McIver: Vicky, stop drooling and sit down. Sit down! And shut up!
- Victoria Inch: You tell your Dr. Mciver you saw me and I said you've gone too far! And tell him to keep his loose, busybody wife's nose out of my affairs!
- Mr. Capp: Ah, incompleteness. That's the only triumph worthwhile. With a finished work, you subject yourself to public scrutiny, praise, ridicule, and all the other vulgarities that go with accomplishment.
- Dr. Stewart 'Mac' McIver: I'd be home more, Karen, if there were more to come home to.
- Karen McIver: What, for instance?
- Dr. Stewart 'Mac' McIver: A real woman.
- Karen McIver: You don't make me feel like a woman. What do you think I've been trying to tell you for months? I am a woman. I want to be one, but I - I have to feel I - I'm desired!
- Dr. Stewart 'Mac' McIver: Everyone thinks you're desirable.
- Karen McIver: Do you? Do you!
- Steven Holte: An hour ago I - don't laugh - I thought I was well enough to get out of here. It's like trying to get out of a greased well.
- Dr. Stewart 'Mac' McIver: I don't know where he is. Nobody seems to. Just threw his stink bomb and ran.
- Dr. Stewart 'Mac' McIver: Hey, that's good! Isn't it?
- Meg Faversen Rinehart: Stevie has a sardonic touch, a sort of jovial Goya.
- Dr. Stewart 'Mac' McIver: Terrific.
- Mrs. Shirley Irwin: I think more like Steinberg.
- Abe Irwin: More like you're all a little drunk.
- Meg Faversen Rinehart: Everything is debatable in life, except babies. Husbands, careers, art - when a baby is around, nothing else counts.
- Steven Holte: Being with you right now, is real, only, my feelings about now, how do I know where they come from, or have I got them all mixed up with something else?
- Mr. Capp: Miss Gavney, please! One doctor at a time. Let's not interfere with good old Devanal's work. Ha! He's making me fit to face the world. The futility and the emptiness. The hydrogen bomb. Say, I may even be fit to cope with my mother! There's a formidable woman, Miss Gavney, quick of eye, steady of hand. Never been known to miss with a knife in the back.
- Steven Holte: It's hard for everybody, but particularly for us. Because all the sick feelings out of the past hook onto things in the present.
- Miss Gavney: Well, Mr. Capp, you must be as drowsy as a kitten. How about bed now - and some sleep?
- Mr. Capp: That's the wittiest remark since the passing of Oscar Wilde.
- Mr. Capp: Cobby, did you know that Thomas Edison never slept more than 42 minutes a night in his whole life? No wonder he tinkered around.
- Dr. Stewart 'Mac' McIver: How bad is it, Tim?
- Dr. Tim Carmody: Pretty bad. We have a very disturbed house. There's been a lot of talk all day about those new drapes.
- Mr. Capp: Man shall not minister to my disease, Plucked from the memory of rooted sorrow, Raise up the hidden troubles of the brain, And, with some sweet, oblivious antidote, cleanse...
- Meg Faversen Rinehart: I've been living in a dream these last few days. It has to stop. I have to wake up.
- Karen McIver: We've covered a lot of ground, for two people who have forgotten how to talk to each other. What do we do now?