“I don’t know who hired you or what they told you about the job, but it starts to wear on you. It’s not all changing bedsheets and cleaning plates. You have to look without seeing, hear without listening. We’re objects up there, living statues meant to serve….Especially now, with this Scarlet Guard business. It’s never a good time to be a Red, but this is very bad.”
“Though we are commanded to ‘wash ourselves’, to ‘cleanse ourselves from sins’, to ‘purge ourselves from all our iniquities’, yet to imagine that we can do these things by our own efforts is to trample on the cross and grace of Jesus Christ.”
“But the truth was the drain had made him very slimy, and it was necessary for him to take a bath and sprinkle himself with a bit of his mother’s violet water before he felt himself again.”
″ ‘The thing that takes spots off a dress is a wall!’ Then we saw the cat wipe the spot of the dress. Now the dress was all clean. But the wall! What a mess!”
“Look close in my hand I have Little Cat V. On his head are Cats W, X,Y, and Z. Z is too small to see. So don’t try. You can not. But Z is the cat who will clean up that spot!”
“It was a curious fact, nevertheless, that at prayers that evening there were more clean faces among the Tadpoles than had been seen there since the formation of that ancient and honorable fraternity.”
“Once he brought home a lost cat, and some time later a stray puppy. But his mother said animals brought dirt into the house, and so Pascal was soon alone again in his mother’s clean well-kept rooms.”
″ ‘Daddy!’ calls Alfie. ‘We forgot to brush my teeth.’ Daddy comes. He has brought a toothbrush and a glass of water. Alfie brushes his teeth. Tonight he brushes them extra carefully. Every tooth gets clean.”
“Tom was amphibious: and what is better still, he was clean. For the first time in his life, he felt how comfortable it was to have nothing on him but himself. But he only enjoyed it: he did not know it, or think about it; just as you enjoy life and health, and yet never think about being alive and healthy; and may it be long before you have to think about it!”
“If you get to like them and understand them, if you are kind to them and don’t scratch their paint or bang their doors, if you fill them up when they need it, if you keep them clean and polished and out of the rain and snow as much as possible, you will find, you may find, that they become almost like persons- more than just ordinary persons: magical persons!”