- Laura Reynolds: Manliness is not all swagger and mountain climbing. It's also tenderness and gentleness and consideration.
- Tom Lee: I'm always falling in love with the wrong people.
- Laura Reynolds: Who isn't?
- Tom Lee: You too?
- Laura Reynolds: Well, it wouldn't be any fun if we didn't. Of course, nothing ever comes of it, but there are bittersweet memories, and they can be pleasant.
- Bill Reynolds: When I was a kid here in this school, I had my problems too. I used to sit in my room and listen to phonograph records hour after hour. I had a place where I used to go and cry my eyes out.
- Laura Reynolds: Oh, Bill.
- Bill Reynolds: But I've got over it, Laura. I learned how to take it. Now when the headmaster's wife gave you that silver teapot, she told you just what she tells all of the other master's wives that you've got to be an interested bystander.
- Laura Reynolds: Yes, yes, I know.
- Bill Reynolds: And just as she says, Laura. All you're supposed to do is once in a while give the boys a little tea...
- Laura Reynolds: Tea and sympathy.
- Bill Reynolds: [laughs] You remember that?
- Laura Reynolds: Yes, I remember.
- Tom Lee: She was just out of college. Tall, blond, honey-colored hair, and she wore a polo coat and drove a convertible.
- Laura Reynolds: Oh, sounds very fetching.
- Tom Lee: Yeah, ever since then, I've been a sucker for girls in polo coats.
- Laura Reynolds: I think I have one.
- Tom Lee: Yes, I know.
- Tom Lee: All I remember about my mother is she was always telling me to go outside and bounce a ball.
- Tom Lee: My dad's going to hit the roof when he hears I'm playing a girl.
- Laura Reynolds: I think you're a good sport not to mind.
- Tom Lee: He's always after me to join up clubs and things and the dramatic club would only take me if I'd play this part.
- Laura Reynolds: Well, it's a good part: Lady Teazle in "The School for Scandal."
- Tom Lee: [singing] The joys of love are but a moment long, The grief of love endures forever more...
- Tom Lee: You must have gotten lots of flowers when you were acting in the theater.
- Laura Reynolds: Oh, now and then. Nothing spectacular. Anyway, I was never any great shakes at it.
- Tom Lee: Oh, I can't believe that.
- Laura Reynolds: Oh, then you take my word for it.
- Laura Reynolds: [to Tom] Take the skirt up to your room and see if you can move around in it, you know, get used to it.
- Laura Reynolds: Come on, put your arms around me.
- Tom Lee: We'd better put it off. We look kind of silly, both of us in skirts.
- Laura Reynolds: All right then. You take it off.
- Lilly Sears: You know, these boys come here ignorant as all get-out about women, and they spend the next four years exchanging misinformation.
- Laura Reynolds: Oh, Lilly. Honestly.
- Lilly Sears: This is the age Romeo should be played. So intense. Why these kids would die for love or almost anything else.
- Bill Reynolds: Wait a minute, fellas. This school doesn't make anybody do anything he doesn't want to. But if he prefers the company of women, that's his business.
- Bill Reynolds: He got himself a little nickname: "Sister Boy".
- Laura Reynolds: I hope you set them straight!
- Bill Reynolds: What was there to set them straight about?
- Tom Lee: I keep telling you guys, I don't want a bunch of Peeping Toms mussing up my room all the time. Hey, Al, do we have to have these Peeping Toms hanging out of my window every afternoon?
- Bill Reynolds: He is an off-horse, Herb.
- Herb Lee: He's going to have to learn to run with the other horses.
- Herb Lee: Why isn't he a regular fellow, Bill? He's had every chance to be since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. Boys camps, boarding schools. I've always seen to it that he was associated with regular guys. Why doesn't some of it rub off?
- Laura Reynolds: Mr. Lee. Mr. Lee, perhaps I'm not the one to say this, but I think he is a regular fellow, whatever that is.
- Herb Lee: You're being very generous to say that, Laura, but - well, it just doesn't jive with the facts.
- Bill Reynolds: Herb, he's a strange kid. He keeps to himself. He's different from the rest of them, and naturally, they just resent it. Well, this whole thing came to a head because last Wednesday he was supposed to go swimming with the varsity club. Instead, he went down to the beach with some faculty wives. Some of the boys came upon him, and there he was, sitting with them - sewing.
- Herb Lee: He makes it so difficult for me. My associates ask me what he wants to be, and I have to tell them that - he hasn't made up his mind. Because I just won't tell them that he wants to be a - a folk singer.
- Bill Reynolds: Look, Laura, stay out of these things. I told you when I brought you here a year ago that this was going to be an awfully tough place for a woman with a heart like yours. I told you that you'd run into boys, big and little. They'd all have problems, problems which for the moment would seem gigantic and heartbreaking.
- Laura Reynolds: It's a heartbreaking time. They're no longer a boy and not yet a man, wondering what's going to be expected of them as men, how they'll measure up.
- Al: All the time alone, wandering off up to the golf course, taking off on his bike, listening to phonograph records alone over in the choir room.
- Laura Reynolds: Al, there are certain times in your life when you would rather be alone than with crowds of people.
- Laura Reynolds: You're big and brawny and an athlete and what they call a top guy and a hard hitter.
- Al: Why doesn't he talk about the same things the other guys talk about? Long-hair music! All the time!
- Laura Reynolds: All right, he wants to be a singer, so he talks about it.
- Al: I think you're swell, Mrs. Reynolds. I think you're the nicest housemaster's wife I've ever run into.
- Laura Reynolds: Can't I persuade you to stay? We were getting on so well.
- Tom Lee: Thanks.
- Laura Reynolds: In another moment I'd have told you all the deep, dark secrets of my life.
- Laura Reynolds: He was kind and gentle and lonely. We knew it wouldn't last. We sensed it. But he always said, "Why must the test of everything be it's durability?"
- Tom Lee: I'm sorry he was killed.
- Laura Reynolds: I'm sorry he was killed the *way* he was killed. In trying to prove he was a man, he died a boy.
- Laura Reynolds: Oh, Bill. We so rarely - touch anymore. I keep feeling I'm losing contact with you. Don't you feel that?
- Ellie Martin: Oh, look, look. Now, relax, huh? Relax! Now, look, just sort of walk to the music in time. And if you don't want to walk, you just stand still. Just relax, huh? Relax. Now, come on. Come on. Ba-ba-ba Bah Ba-ba-ba-bah...
- Ellie Martin: Wanna dance?
- Tom Lee: I don't dance.
- Ellie Martin: Well, I'm gonna teach you. It will sort of get us in the same county, huh?
- Ellie Martin: Aren't we the original hot and cold boy?
- Tom Lee: I'm sorry.
- Ellie Martin: Now listen, quit being so sorry or I'm gonna be sorry, too. Come on.
- Ellie Martin: Well, my, my! Now, don't tell me I'm the first girl you ever kissed, huh? Well, I get 'em all. Now, come on, puppy. Give me your paw. You see? You getting the idea or do you wanna call Mama and ask her what to do, huh?
- Laura Reynolds: I knew what he was going to do and why he was going to do it. He had to prove to you bullies that he was a man.
- Bill Reynolds: You've been talking about manliness. What do you know about a man? You were married first to that boy, again, a poor, pitiable boy. You want to mother a boy, not love a man.
- Herb Lee: I suppose it is hard for a woman to understand, but believe me, Laura, in years to come, it'll be just another amusing smoking-car story.
- Laura Reynolds: You are old enough now to know that when you drop a pebble in the water, there are ever-widening circles of ripples. There are *always* consequences.