Mister Pip Quotes
"His eyes were too interested in what lay up ahead to notice us barefoot kids."
"He looked like someone who had seen or known great suffering and hadn’t been able to forget it."
"Some days he wore a clown’s nose. His nose was already big. He didn’t need that red lightbulb."
"You saw her huge bum and worried about the toilet seat."
"There were only the two of them, Mr. and Mrs. Pop Eye, yet it felt like a procession."
"We loved that word—parasol—and we weren’t about to lose it."
"Because Pop Eye was the only white for miles around, little kids stared at him until their ice blocks melted over their black hands."
"We had grown up believing white to be the color of all the important things."
"The shape of the letters on the headstone gave Pip the idea his father was a 'square, stout, dark man with curly black hair.'"
"But silence is good for a lot of things—sleeping, being at one with God, thinking about the Good Book."
"A gentleman is a man who never forgets his manners, no matter the situation."
"What if I was to tell you that some gardens begin their lives in oceans?"
"Blue also has magical powers. You watch a reef and tell me if I am lying."
"A smile can be a trick. To stay sweet you have to protect yourself."
"We can make it new with the things we find and see around us."
"But if you care to listen, I will tell you everything I know about the color blue."
"You could say the same about a house or one’s country. You gain as you lose, and vice versa."
"That is one of those difficult questions I warned the class about."
"Once again, Dolores, you have provided us with food for thought."
"A girl who wears braids knows right from wrong—and she's no bloody show-off."
"The reason for braids is to keep flies off you and to shoo away the boys who want to stick their hands where they shouldn't."
"Stories have a job to do. They can't just lie around like lazybone dogs."
"Curiosity killed the cat. If everything we did made sense, the world would be a different place."
"Life would be less interesting, don't you think?"
"The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was everywhere."
"We preferred hearing about dogs drunk on jungle juice."
"The moment she left, Mr. Watts knew what to do."
"Our only consolation was that by reading it a second and third time we would still have another country to flee to."
"What’s it like to be white? A bit of what the last mammoth must have felt, I suppose. Lonely at times."
"We watched them enter our houses. We heard them breaking up our things."
"We waited for Mr. Watts to come up with something new to fill that hole in our lives."
"I knew Grace when she was small. This small."
"Grace was the smartest of all us kids, Matilda."
"This was always my mum’s advice. Get down to the beach before the world has woken and you will find God."
"A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames."
"We were too shocked to dispute what he said."
"Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing."
"The world is gray at that hour; it moves more slowly."
"I didn’t find God, but at the far end of the beach I saw two men glide ashore in a boat."
"The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames."
"I was afraid she would say no, and I was afraid of what I would choose."
"Dreams are private, she said. And she is right. A dream is a story that no one else will get to hear or read."
"Thanks to dreams, in the history of the galaxy the world has been reinvented more often than there are stars."
"To whip out an inconvenient word would be an act of vandalism, like smashing the window of a chapel."
"It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home."
"We needed a teacher, Mr. Watts became that teacher. We needed a magician to conjure up other worlds, and Mr. Watts had become that magician."
"I have fallen out of love with his characters. They are too loud; they are grotesques."
"But strip away their masks and you find what their creator understood about the human soul and all its suffering and vanity."
"Our voice could never be taken away from us."
"Pip is my story, and in the next day I would try where Pip had failed. I would try to return home."