Rachel Ingalls > Quotes

“Why do you call him a monster?”
“Well, an eight-foot tall green gorilla with web feet and bug eyes—what would you call him? A well-developed frog? Not exactly an Ivy-league type, anyway.’”
“I’ve met plenty of Ivy-leaguers I’d call monsters.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“Sweep everything under the rug for long enough, and you have to move right out of the house.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“If we all only owned the things we needed! You don’t understand the nature of desire.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“There, up in the sky, she noticed for the first time a gigantic mounded cloud, as large and elaborately moulded as a baroque opera house and lit from below and at the sides by pink and creamy hues. It sailed beyond her, improbable and romantic, following in the blue sky the course she was taking down below. It seemed to her that it must be a good omen.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs Caliban

“You know, it's wonderful to see another world. It's entirely unlike anything that has ever come to your thoughts. And everything in it fits. You couldn't have dreamed it up yourself, but somehow it all seems to work, and each tiny part is related. Everything except me. If I had known I was only going to stay a short while, this would have been the most exciting thing I could imagine -- a marvel in my life. But to know that it's for ever, that I'll always be here where I'm not able to belong, and that I'll never be able to get back home, never...”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“An exhaustion came over her: the artificial weariness enforced upon someone who has many capabilities and is consistently prevented from using any of them.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Three Masquerades: Novellas

“How fast everything had seemed, and how special and different and sophisticated and rich. All the things that had struck me at first—the odd formality that would have been unfriendliness at home, the attitudinizing, the orgies of talk, the tension and snobbery—seemed to make life so complicated. But then you acquire a taste for complicated things, nothing simpler will satisfy you. Go back home, and it's a let-down, there's something missing, everything is slower, duller, the conversation makes you want to bang your head against the wall.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Something to Write Home About

“I bitterly resent all that wasted time. And what I resent most of all is that the ones I did get never, never looked like the Greek statues.”
“The Greek-statue types may have been too busy going out with other boys to notice you.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“For a long while after her own divorce, Estelle had strongly urged Dorothy to follow suit. She had been particularly persistent, Dorothy thought, because she wanted the companionship of a similar destiny, as newly-married women want all their friends to be married, too. Or women newly become mothers, Dorothy remembered, who urge motherhood on others.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“The ocean was different from an aquarium, which was an artificial environment. The ocean was a world. And a world is not art'.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“Drugs,” Estelle said. “Money and drugs, and that’s the history of civilization.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs Caliban

“Only much later did the realization of her helplessness contribute to a certainty that nurses, doctors, in fact the whole idea of medicine, had made her a victim. To her it had not brought healing. It had brought death where she was sure death had been avoidable.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“She came back into the kitchen fast, to make sure that she caught the toasting cheese in time. And she was halfway across the checked linoleum floor of her nice safe kitchen, when the screen door opened and a gigantic six-foot-seven-inch frog-like creature shouldered its way into the house and stood stock-still in front of her, crouching slightly, and staring straight at her face.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“I can’t imagine living in a different time,” Estelle said. “Not in the future, and certainly not in the past. Can you?”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“After the marriage, Edward changed along with everything else. The barriers came up all around her. Where once, on the outside, she had felt shut out of their exclusive family, now--on the inside--she was debarred from the rest of the world.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Three Masquerades: Novellas

“But when they got to the room...he thought how stupid it was not to realize what it would be like: the sprung, creaky bed, sheets that hadn't been changed from the time before, and the woman herself as she undressed and the clothes came away like the store wrapping on an uncooked chicken, a large piece of meat sitting down on the bed and nothing to do with him.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Something to Write Home About

“There are so many different attitudes, like different lives, in a face and in a body. So many lines and forms, so many strengths and weaknesses. The expression of health, of nervousness, even the expression of truth, are things you can look at. How long it takes to know them all. And you never do, not completely. A body or face is never the same even in a single day. And the mind, that's even more difficult.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Something to Write Home About

“Larry, you're all I've got," she said.
He spread his arms out away from the car to take in the earth and sky all around, and said, "You've got all this. And you live here. It's your home.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“And am I your secret vice?” she asked. “No, my secret vice is avocados.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“You don’t understand the nature of desire.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“I think we're too unhappy to get a divorce.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“But down there it would be dark now, and not the lovely lighted aquarium she imagined it to be during the daylight hours, eddying with schools of tiny, delicate animals floating and dancing slowly to their own serene currents and creating the look of a living painting. That was wrong, in any case. The ocean was different from an aquarium, which was an artificial environment. The ocean was a world. And a world is not art. Dorothy thought about the living things that moved in that world: large, ruthless and hungry. Like us up here.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“But he never came.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“But we didn't love each other," he said matter-of-factly. It upset her to hear him say it. Someone should love her. Even her children-- they needed her, but she was the one who did the loving.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Three Masquerades: Novellas

“She looked over to where he was, seated at the other end of the kitchen table in the light which, since his arrival, she had blocked by curtains because of his sensitive eyes. He concentrated on polishing spoons with a silver cloth: six teaspoons from a great-aunt. One leg was slung over the other, which would have looked strange enough, but he was also wearing a flowered apron fastened around his waist, and it contrasted stunningly with his large, muscular green body, his nobly massive head. Dorothy thought he looked, as always, wonderful.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“A woman, she thought, can get the eyes and everything else right without any trouble: her creative power is inherent. Men can never create; they only copy. That's why they're always so jealous.”
― Rachel Ingalls, In the Act

“Still, people would notice a man with a green head. I guess I should get you a wig.”
“Good. I think I’ll try a different colour every night.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“Perhaps, like her, laboratory rats took a pride in solving the puzzles scientists set them. The pleasures of obsession.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“She left the highway, drove straight on, turned off into the street that ran by the plant nurseries, passed the fancy villas with their big gardens, and went around the corner. There, up in the sky, she noticed for the first time a gigantic mounded cloud, as large and elaborately moulded as a baroque opera house and lit from below and at the sides by pink and creamy hues. It sailed beyond her, improbable and romantic, following in the blue sky the course she was taking down below. It seemed to her that it must be a good omen.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban