“You are scored on my heart, Clark. You were from the first day you walked in, with your ridiculous clothes and your bad jokes and your complete inability to ever hide a single thing you felt.”
“How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibilty, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes—how such people think nothing of abusing a man with low intelligence.”
Some people are slow to take offense, which may make you misjudge the thickness of their skin, and fail to worry about insulting them. But should you offend their honor and their pride, they will overwhelm you with a violence that seems sudden and extreme given their slowness to anger.
″‘We’d better hurry or we’ll be late for dinner,’ I said, breaking into what Finny called my “West Point stride.” Phineas didn’t really dislike West Point in particular or authority in general, but just considered authority the necessary evil against which happiness was achieved by reaction, the backboard which returned all the insults he threw at it.”
“Oh, my brother, an insult has been put on me that is deeper than my life. For on the beach my canoe is broken, my house is burned, and in the brush a dead man lies. Every escape is cut off. You must hide us, my brother.”
“I canna tell whether ya mean to compliment my virility Sassenach, or insult my morals, but I dinna care much for either suggestion. Murtaugh told me women were unreasonable, but Jesus God.”
“Birdbrain, thought Mrs. Frisby, and then recalled what her husband used to say: The size of the brain is no measure of its capacity. And well she might recall it, for the crow’s head was double the size of her own.”
″‘You mustn’t excite yourself, please Mistress. Remember your health. And the health of the innocent babe you carry.’
‘Innocent babe,’ Ursula muttered. ‘A woman like that is more apt to be carrying a demon.‘”
“Upstairs into dining-room. Family not finished lunch yet. Young Mr Brown throws a bread pellet at me, hitting me on the nozzle. An insult. I swallow the insult.”
“When your body takes up more room than your voice you are always the target of well-aimed rumors, which is why I let my knuckles talk for me. Which is why I learned to shrug when my name was replaced by insults.”
″‘The difference is that in this picture you were fatter, with chubbier cheeks. But it’s you for sure!’ Realizing that our classmates were around, he added loudly, ‘Don’t think I wouldn’t recognize that jelly-donut face anywhere.‘”
“Charlotte did not like being called standoffish much. But it was so difficult when she was only here every other day. Often she did not know what had happened, what was going on, and she was afraid of showing it, of saying things that might make everyone suspicious.”
″‘An actor?’ Bore blurted as if it finally got through to him.
‘Dad, it’s the only thing I’m really interested in doing. I want to go to acting school right after graduation. Everyone says that’s what I should be, with my imagination—’
‘Try eating your imagination when you’re hungry sometime.‘”
“And she said I was no gentleman, and refused to tell me. So as she wouldn’t confess, of course I arrested her, and to be on the safe side I also arrested everybody else in the shop, and the Baby into the bargain.”
″‘Well, why should they be? Do you expect everything you draw to appear here?’ Mark looked scornfully around the room. ‘If so, all I can say is, you must be a very good hand at drawing nothing.‘”
“Now you are in my power, to slay or spare as I will! And I will kill you forewith, unless you kneel and yield to me, confessing yourself to be a knight of little worth.”
“He had lost the Minnow to her rightful and unpleasant owner; he would have to go ashore and fight the owner for calling him a thief, and, as he was the smaller boy, he would probably be beaten.”
“What do you think she wants with a scratched, broken, cheap toy like you? Do you expect to come and live in her playhouse with us? Look round you and think again!”
“We can do our family members down as much as we like. But the second an outsider insults them our blood seethes. At the end of the day I don’t like him- but I love him. And I see my own failures in him.”
“Well, they didn’t pick you for your looks, that’s sure and certain,” was Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s emphatic comment. Mrs. Rachel was one of those delightful and popular people who pride themselves on speaking their mind without fear or favor.
but it would be an insult to the nature of Anne’s felicity, to draw any comparison between it and her sister’s; the origin of one all selfish vanity, of the other all generous attachment.