Jacob Portman Quotes

“If it meant that I’d finally be able to put my grandfather’s mystery to rest and get on with my unextraordinary life, anything I had to endure would be worth it.”

“Even my best and only friend Ricky didn’t believe me, and he’d been there.”

“When I was six I decided that my only chance of having a life half as exciting as Grandpa Portman’s was to become an explorer.”

“If Grandpa Portman wasn’t honorable and good, I wasn’t sure anyone could be.”

“There was a girl who could fly, a boy who had bees living inside him, a brother and sister who could lift boulders over their heads.”

“It was as if being here had some kind of narcotic effect on me; like the loop itself was a drug—a mood enhancer and a sedative combined—and if I stayed too long, I’d never want to leave. ”

“The image was so strange, and yet it was nothing like my grandfather’s pictures. There were no tricks here. It was just a woman—a woman smoking a pipe.”

“One day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered.”

“This is Abraham’s grandson, Jacob. He is our honored guest and has come a very long way to be here. I hope you will treat him accordingly.”

“I gazed at it in wonder—not because it was awful, but because it was beautiful.”

“I thought I’d scared you off it. How’s our haunted mansion faring these days? Still standing?”

“Help us find more people like you. In return, you’ll have nothing to fear from Malthus or his kind. You can live at my home. In your free time you’ll come with me and see the world, and we’ll pay you handsomely.”

“My grandfather was the only member of his family to escape Poland before the Second World War broke out.”

“I thought about it, looking at the pictures and then at my grandfather, his face so earnest and open. What reason would he have to lie?”

“My grandmother had bought my dad this ridiculous pink bunny costume, and he put it on and sat by the driveway waiting for Grandpa Portman to come home from five o’clock until nightfall, but he never did.”

“In that narrow cut of light I saw a face that seemed to have been transplanted directly from the nightmares of my childhood.”