Geraldine McCaughrean Quotes

“Her anger had begun with the failure of the mountain, but had grown so great that it no longer needed reasons to overspill. (‘She is not angry with you,’ their father used to whisper to Maro and Inez last thing at night. But it was sometimes hard to believe.)

″‘Don’t be sillier than you were born,’ said Inez with patient scorn. ‘Enoque and Honorio are garimpeiros. They’re gold-miners. It’s all they know about. They don’t have a brain between them to do anything else.’ ‘Then they’re mining for gold!’

“Da Souza himself felt unwanted, left behind in this ghost town of a place, among the empty houses, with a wife and three children to support on the proceeds from a store where nobody shopped any more.”

″‘Couldn’t Great-Grandma have used the names again, once the children were dead?’ asked Inez, being practical. ‘And how would brother and sister be told apart in Heaven, may I ask? And the bad luck! Consider the bad luck!‘”

“But even Inez could not discount the obvious. Enoque and Honorio were digging for gold outside the shop.”

″‘A fine woman. A cultured woman,’ they said, but were glad it was their children and not they who had to spend each day in the classroom. The Ferretti voice rang out across the empty town, like a tocsin bell announcing the outbreak of battle: Senhora Ferretti’s battle against Ignorance.”

“Gold. A funny thing, really, for the world to place such value on, thought Inez vaguely. Something lying about in the ground. Why not something hard to come by? Something men had to climb up high for...”

“Inez thought [the Baby] must be searching for a name, since Mrs. da Souza would not give it one. Mrs. da Souza considered it a waste to name a child before knowing whether it would survive.”

“In those days we had everything. Everything a man could want. Even things to complain about. Before the mountain failed.”

“Picked in a rage, her salads contained increasingly strange ingredients: nettles and geraniums, gum wrappers blown off the street, clothes pegs fallen off the washing line.”

″‘It didn’t seem right just to send him away. He was so very willing... Such a good-looking boy, too,’ she added vaguely. ‘What’s that got to do with it? He’s weird.‘”

“She eased her shoulder out from under his chin and turned to look at him properly, wondering if this was the kind of stranger she was supposed not to speak to. On the whole, she thought he was.”

“So they waited, and grumbled, and watched the macaroni cheese congeal between them on the table. But MCC Berkshire never came for his supper. Not that night or any night.”

″‘Oh, I’ll work for nothing! Don’t you worry about the money side. I haven’t got any, either. Don’t think another thing about it. A bite of lunch and a free run of the books you’ve got in stock.‘”

″‘But it was all lies,’ whispered Mrs. Povey, there being no polite way to put it. MCC Berkshire drew himself up to his full six foot and more. ‘Lies, madam?’ ‘Well, er... yes actually... lies.’ ‘Not lies, madam,’ he declared, magnificently unrepentant. ‘Fiction...‘”

″‘You’ll help me, won’t you?’ he cried, walking across to Ailsa on his knees. ‘You won’t see my thrown out to wander the streets with nothing but traffic signs and graffiti to read and nowhere to lay my head at night!‘”

″‘You’re a liar, sir,’ thought Ailsa. But nice, polite girls never say that kind of thing aloud. It is not in their upbringing.”

“Let me tell it to you the way it was, and you judge for yourself if there isn’t a meaning and charm in the decline and fall of this clock.”

“I don’t know about luck, you young -er- but it’s brought me the best morning’s entertainment since General Patton got trod on by the regimental drummer’s horse.”

″‘You’re a Utilitarian, sir!’ said MCC, snatching it back. ‘I’m a Sikh, sir!’ ‘But you think a thing is beautiful only if it’s useful. You are a Utilitarian!‘”