The Ray Bradbury Theater (TV Series)

The Day It Rained Forever (1990)

Vincent Gardenia: Mr. Terle

Photos 

Quotes 

• Mr. Smith : How can you have such faith? How can I learn to sing along with you?

  Mr. Terle : You've got to write your own hymns, or they aren't worth singing.

• Mr. Terle : Go on with your life, Miss Hillgood.

  Blanche Hillgood : Where was I? Oh, yes. All my life I've spent so much time running from Bach to Beethoven to Brahms, I never noticed I was twenty-nine. Next thing I knew, I was forty. Yesterday, sixty-five. Oh, there were men; but they'd given up singing when they were ten, flying when they were twelve. I always figured we were meant to fly, one way or other, so most of the time I couldn't stand most men who just shuffled by with the iron of the earth in their feet and blood. I never met a man who weighed less than nine hundred pounds. In their black business suits, you could just hear them roll by like funeral hearses.

  Mr. Terle : So you flew away?

  Blanche Hillgood : First just in my mind, Mr. Terle. It's taken me forty years to make the final break. It's been the long way around that's brought me here. No one in all Elm City really cares if you fly or how high you go. But talk of leaving, they swat you down and laugh. And say, "Why be a little frog in a big pond when you can be the biggest frog in all Elm City!" Which may be true. Except Elm City's the wrong pond. So at last I shook myself good and stared in the mirror, and asked myself, "Look here, Blanche Hillgood. Since when do frogs have wings, anyway? And will they ever?"