Narrator (The Scarlet Ibis) Quotes

“Don’t leave me, brother. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me.”

“But all of us must have something to be proud of, and Doodle had become mine. I did not know then that pride is a wonderful, terrible thing, a seed that bears two vines, life and death.”

“Aw, come on, Doodle. You can do it. Do you want to be different from everybody else when you start school?”

“For a long time, it seemed forever, I lay there crying, sheltering my scarlet ibis from the heresy of rain.”

“Such a name sounds good only on a tombstone.”

“Renaming my brother was perhaps the kindest thing I ever did for him, because nobody expects much from someone called Doodle.”

“Finally, I could see I was licked. Doodle was my brother, and he was going to cling to me forever, no matter what I did, so I dragged him across the burning cotton field to share with him the only beauty I knew, Old Woman Swamp.”

“There is within me (and with sadness I have watched it in others) a knot of cruelty borne by the stream of love, much as our blood sometimes bears the seed of our destruction, and at times I was mean to Doodle.”

“Of course, I was old enough to know this wouldn’t work out, but the picture he painted was so beautiful and serene that all I could do was whisper yes, yes.”

“They did not know that I did it for myself; that pride, whose slave I was, spoke to me louder than all their voices; and that Doodle walked only because I was ashamed of having a crippled brother.”

“Of course, I was old enough to know this wouldn’t work out, but the picture he painted was so beautiful and serene that all I could do was whisper yes, yes.”