Constance Petersen quotes from Spellbound (1945)

Constance Petersen

Are you making love to me?

I will in a moment. I'm just clearing the ground first. [tries to kiss her, but she recoils] It's rather like embracing a textbook.

Constance Petersen

But why do you do it, then?

Because you're not a textbook. You're a sweet, pulsing, adorable woman underneath. I sense it every time I come near you.

Constance Petersen

You sense only your own desires and pulsations. I assure you, mine in no way resemble them.

Constance Petersen

I think the greatest harm done the human race has been done by the poets

Oh, poets are dull boys, most of them, but not especially fiendish.

Constance Petersen

They keep filling people's heads with delusions about love... writing about it as if it were a symphony orchestra or a flight of angels.

Which is isn't, eh?

Constance Petersen

Of course not. People fall in love, as they put it, because they respond to a certain hair coloring or vocal tones or mannerisms that remind them of their parents.

Or... or... sometimes for no reason at all.

Constance Petersen

That's not the point. The point is that people read about love as one thing and experience it as another. Well, they expect kisses to be like lyrical poems and embraces to be like Shakespearean dramas.

And when they find out differently, then they get sick and have to be analyzed, eh?

Constance Petersen

Yes, very often.

Professor, you're suffering from "mogo on the gogo"

Constance Petersen

I beg your pardon!

Constance Petersen

All analysts have to be psychoanalyzed by other analysts before they start practicing.

Ahhh, that's to make sure that they're not too crazy.