″‘Very well!’ said Bilbo very downcast, and also rather annoyed. ‘Come along back to your nice cells, and I will lock you all in again, and you can sit there comfortably and think of a better plan-but I don’t suppose I shall ever get hold of the keys again, even if I feel inclined to try.‘”
“Stop saying that word. It was inconceivable that anyone could follow us, but when we looked behind, there was the man in black. It was inconceivable that anyone could sail as fast as we could sail, and yet he gained on us. Now this too is inconceivable, but look—look . . . See how he rises.”
“Being an annoyance is something that I am very good at. In fact, I’m far more than just a ‘mild’ annoyance--people tell me I can be downright frustrating. Might as well use this talent for the cause of good, eh?”
“John Wesley kicked the back of the front seat and June Star hung over her mother’s shoulder and whined desperately into her ear that they never had any fun even on their vacation, that they could never do what THEY wanted to do.”
“Puddleglum’s question annoyed her because, deep down inside her, she was already annoyed with herself for not knowing the Lion’s lesson quite so well as she felt she ought to have known it. This annoyance, added to the misery of being very cold and tired, made her say, ‘Bother the signs.’ She didn’t perhaps quite mean it.”
“I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.”
“I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of children in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is, in the present deplorable state of the kingdom, a very great additional grievance.”
“She came round where I could see her, her arms halfway stretched out as though she would have liked to embrace me but dared not. I jumped aside. Did I think her touch would taint me? Somehow infect me with the weakness I perceived in her? ‘You could have done anything, been anything you wanted.’
‘But I am what I wanted to be,’ she said letting her arms fall to her sides. ‘I chose. No one made me become what I am.‘”
“At playtime she twirled and spun across the playground so fast that none of the little boys in her class could catch her, and they were all very annoyed.”
“Baby Bear was not asleep either. He was lying in bed pretending to be an aeroplane.
‘NYAAOW!’ went Baby Bear, ‘NYAAOW! NYAAOW!’
‘Oh NO!’ said Mr. Bear, ‘I can’t stand THIS.‘”
“She knew she was a comfort, and docile, because she’d heard her mother say so. And the others knew she was, too, by now, because ever since that day Katharine would keep boasting about what a comfort she was, and how docile, until Jane declared she would utter a piercing shriek and fall over dead if she heard another word about it.”
“The best way of travel, however, if you aren’t in a hurry at all, if you don’t care where you are going, if you don’t like to use your legs, if you want to see everything quite clearly, if you don’t want to be annoyed at all by any choice of directions, is in a balloon.”