A-level English/Wise Children/Key Quotes

Quotations by theme

Because you are not allowed to take the book into the exam, it is important that you learn some key quotes. Here are some of the most important ones.

Shakespeare

• "Shakespeare was a kind of god for him"
• "Birnam wood is creeping up on Dunsinane"
• "Perhaps Shakespeare had eaten such a soup!"
• "Here she is in drag as, famously, Hamlet"
• "Off with it! You only lent it to me! Nothing was mine, not ever!"
• "Replicas of Anne Hathaway’s cottage"
• "Shakespeare, to whom our family owed so much"
• "Cry God for England, Harry and St George"
• "Shakespeare, on the note, said, “Have a heart”"
• "What You Will" - subtitle for the Twelfth Night
• "Rivers of tears. Tempests of applause"
• "Water, water everywhere did he think it was the bloody tempest!"

Youth and age

• "So well connected. So legitimate. Oh sod it all. So young"
• "Pungent smell of old ladies"
• "Our father had aged more evidently than his brother"
• "Our old age, the fourth guest at the table"
• "Deceptions of memory"
• "Legs, the last thing to go"
• "Old Melchior did something pathetic, he tried to wave the cameras away"
• "I knew in my water…"
• "Boy and girl, a new thing in our family"
• "Old age was creeping up behind him" (Melchior)
• "...geriatric chorine..."

Paternity/Absent Fathers

• "My lovely daughters, all four of you"
• "Father is a hypothesis but mother is a fact"
• "It is a characteristic of human beings that if they haven’t got a family of their own, they will invent one"
• "It is a wise child that knows it's own father"
• "Were both of us mothers and both of us fathers…they’ll be wise children alright."
• “That man is….your father!” her revelation didn’t have the force it might have had.
• The jury is still out on the question of her boy’s paternity (lady M)
• "A father is a movable feast"

Illegitimacy

• "We never felt quite so illegitimate in all our lives"
• "Welcome to the wrong side of the tracks"
• "His eyes skidded over us"
• "And the unrighteous prospered"
• "So well connected. So legitimate. Oh sod it all. So young."
• "It is a characteristic of human beings that if they haven’t got a family of their own, they will invent one."
• "Which mother? Pretty kitty? Grandma?"
• "Us. Unkissed, unwelcome, worse than unacknowledged"
• "The jury is still out on the question of her boy’s paternity (lady M)
• "outside the magic circle of our desire"
• "It's a wise child that knows its own father... But wiser yet the father who knows his own child."
• "e's not your father"
• "there was sod all romantic about our illegitimacy"
• "By blows"
• "...children on the wrong side of the blanket..."
• "...left hand children..."

Fate

• "Fate continued to deal kindly with Melchior
• "The destination of Melchior had been prepared for him since birth
• "He was doomed to wear the pasteboard crown
• "We were doomed to dance and sing
• "The bastard side of Old Father Thames (Page 1)

Fantasy/Carnivalesque

• "The carnival’s got to stop sometime
• "Less of a man, more of a travelling carnival
• "What a joy it is to dance and sing!"

Magic realism

• "As if inhabited by hands"
• "It made a noise in his belly like barrels rolling around in a cellar"
• "French knickers doing the can-can with the frilly petticoats"
• "Perhaps he slipped us one in each pocket of his jacket"
• "And then hup! He did a backflip out of the window, saving us."
• "The naked pillows huddled like a corpse"
• "The bulb flickered on and off"
• "They let the wind in when they opened the door"
• "Stopped short at ten years old, never to go again, like grandfathers clock"
• "And this time got it right, straight on the nosey!"
• "In on the wind that came with Perry blew dozens and dozens of butterflies..."
• "Not bad for a centenarian at all, at all."

Quotations by character

Nora/Dora

"Hello let me introduce myself I'm Dora Chance".

• "But if I told you that, I’d be lying"
• "What a joy it is to dance and sing"
• "Nora was soon in love again"
• "As soon as they started to call me Nora, I found that I could kiss the boys"
• "I've got a tale and a half to tell"
• "We were going exclusively for Lady’s A’s sake"
• "It is a characteristic of human beings that if they haven’t got a family of their own, they will invent one"
• "All of a sudden, I was feeling chipper"
• "Searching for the lost limb…Nora…the best part of me"
• "She used Shalimar, me, Mitsouko"
• "Identical we may be, but symmetrical, never"
• "Our careers went down the toilet with the profession itself"
• "He loved us both but I was the one he talked to."
• "Vulgar as hell"
• "It was all too literal for me"
• "Drunk in charge of a narrative"
• "You never forget the first time. Ill never forget the last time either"
• "Drunk in charge of a baby carriage"
• "Lo how the mighty have fallen"
• "Couple of batty old tarts with their eyes glued on their own ghosts."
• "Treacherous, lecherous chorus girl."

Perry

• "The carnival’s got to stop sometime"
• "Less of a man, more of a travelling carnival"
• "Not bad for a centenarian"
• "One doesn’t marry a man like that"
• "He deflated"
• "He’d brought me on a pilgrimage"
• "It made a noise in his belly like barrels rolling around in a cellar"
• "Bigger than ever and brown as a berry from the Brazilian sun"
• "Where he loved, he never altered, nor saw any alteration"
• "Magician, producer, explorer, seducer, rich man, poor man, but never beggar man or thief"
• "Birnam wood is creeping up on Dunsinane"
• "He was the size of a warehouse, no bigger, the size of a tower block"
• "It was his name on the cheques"
• "Oooh, wasn’t he a handsome young man"
• "Size of a polar bear"
• "Huge but dapper"
• "Peregrine swept us up into his arms"
• "He looked as big as the burning house"
• "Another fad. Like movies. Like oil. Like espionage"
• "He was not the love of my life, but all the loves of my life at once"
• "Did I see the soul of the one I loved when I saw Perry, not his body?"
• "He doubled up as sugar daddy"

"Nora fluxy me constipated"

Melchior

• "Knicker-shifting, undo your brassiere from the back of the gallery eyes "
• "His eyes skidded over us"
• "Fate continued to deal kindly with Melchior"
• "Offed with the old and onned with the new"
• "And the unrighteous prospered"
• "What shall I do without my crown? Othello’s occupation, gone!"
• "Our father had aged more evidently than his brother"
• "Old Melchior did something pathetic, he tried to wave the cameras away"
• "I sometimes wonder if we haven’t been making him up all along"
• "Dark and brooding"
• "Then Melchior did something wonderful. Who'd have thought the old man had it in him?"
• "Our greatest living Shakespearian"
• "Bent on making an exhibition of himself to the very end"
• "As dark and sexy as the inside of a London cab in wartime"
• "Melchior dreamt up his own father"
• "Prince of players"
• "in his voice like Hershey's syrup"

Lady A

• "One doesn’t marry a man like that"
• "Cackling away in her genteel fashion"
• "Even when they robbed their mother of her home and money"
• "We were going exclusively for Lady’s A’s sake"
• "Don’t go before you’ve had coffee…"
• "She twinkled"
• "Lady Atalanta Hazard, the most beautiful woman of her time"
• "I’d even hoped that she and Perry might make a go of it"
• "Our geriatric little girl"
• "I live mostly in the past these days, I find it’s better"
• "Have you got anything in the shape of a cucumber, my good fellow?"

Daisy

• "Enter Daisy"
• "White that matched the cat that matched the telephone"
• "I could tell at a glance that she was tight as a tick"
• "She overshot the drive and screeched to a halt"
• "She was a trouper and a half alright, she'd got legs, guts, leather lungs, tits out to here, chutzpah, sass, star quality. But class - no"

Lady Margarine

• "To butter or not to butter?"
• "She reached middle age quicker than any woman I knew"
• "The jury is still out on the question of her boy’s paternity"

Saskia

• "She later admitted she’d put something in the cake, but whether it would have made Melchior ill, very ill or finished him off altogether we never found out"
• "So well connected. So legitimate. Oh sod it all. So young"
• "Saskia gave me a dirty look"
• "Her hair redder than ever"
• "I felt that odd familiar shudder of distress when I saw Saskia"
• "You never loved us!"
• "Being unique amongst mammals a cold blooded cow"
• "mercenary bitch"

Imogen

• "Developed a unique line of goldfish breasts"
• "She’d got a fishbowl on her head with a fish in it"

Tiffany

• "Oh my little sister Lily is a whore in Piccadilly and my mother is another in the Strand"
• "Her hands were full of flowers"
• "not on your life, you bastard"
• "marry your auntie instead"
• "Pull yourself together and be a man, or try to"
• "There's more to fathering than fucking"
• "Never a sweeter or more innocent girl than our Tiffany, even though she didn't know enough not to flash her tits all over the papers"
• "The sweetest girl in London, but naïve"

Gareth

• A celibate one – a non-combatant, as it were.
• "To add to the hypothetical,disputed, absent father that was such a feature of our history, now you could add a holy father, too. Put it down to liberation theology."
• "The priest and the game show host, not so different, really."

Grandma Chance

• "Memory lane is a dead end"
• "What the fuck d’you mean?"
• "Hope for the best, expect the worst"
• "Toot sweet"
• "Made ‘mountaynes’ out of ‘molehills’"
• "She took to children like a duck to water"
• "The boarding house clung to respectability by the skin of it’s teeth ...you could have said the same of her"
• "She didn't so much talk as elocute"
• "She wasn't going to let Hitler inconvenience her drinking habits"
• "Grandma invented this family. She put it together out of whatever came to hand... she created it by sheer force of personality"
• "She was a mystery"
• "When I saw you two, the penny dropped"
• "She was a naturist, she was a vegetarian, she was a pacifist"
• "When the bombardments began, she’d go outside and shake her fist at the old men in the sky"
• "She was our air raid shelter, she was our entertainment, she was our breast"

Gorgeous George

• "Clown Number One to the British Empire"
• "He didn't travel. The moment he stepped off his native soil, he stopped being funny. In California, he was not bawdy, he was lewd"
• "Gorgeous George, having stayed himself with a flagon, was trying out a chorus of 'Rose of England' in a defiant and self-conscious manner"

Genghis Khan

• "He was like a bloody dictator in that studio"
• "He pressed a button on his desk and Nora's chair collapsed..and she went sprawling, legs in the air"
• "An orchid had never bit him back before"
• "Genghis Kahn was staking his all on art"

Ross 'Irish' O'Flaherty

• It's only a writer...Ross O'Flaherty RIP"
• "A great future behind him, already"
• "The last flame of a burned out case"
• "'God, you're lovely', he said...I wouldn't be able to return the compliment, alas"
• "old soul"

Puck

• "Puck looked like a little man but wasn't; he was an aged child"
• "Puck was all fingers, goose you as soon as look at you, unmentionable habits"
• "You might find that Puck in your laundry basket, when you least expected it, curled up inhaling your soiled lingerie"
• "Puck passed by and goosed me"
• "if a questing hand reached up from under the tablecloth, you knew it was Pucks night out, too"
• "He drilled holes in the walls of the ladies' toilets and liked to take a peep and I don't know what else"
• "old ladies loved him"
• "he had the high tenor of an angel"