The Twits Quotes

“A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”

“If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it.”

“Mr. Twit felt that this hairiness made him look terrifically wise and grand. But in truth he was neither of these things. Mr. Twit was a twit.”

“Mr. Twit was a twit. He was born a twit. And, now at the age of sixty, he was a bigger twit than ever.”

“How do you outwit a Twit? Mr. and Mrs. Twit are the smelliest, ugliest people in the world. They hate everything — except playing mean jokes on each other, catching innocent birds to put in their Bird Pies, and making their caged monkeys, the Muggle-Wumps, stand on their heads all day. But the Muggle-Wumps have had enough. They don’t just want out, they want revenge.”

“No one who is good can ever be ugly.”

“So what I want to know is this. How often do all these hairy-faced men wash their faces? It is only once a week, like us, on Sunday nights? And do they shampoo it? Do they use a hair-dryer? Do they rub hair-tonic in to stop their faces from going bald? Do they go to a barber to have their hairy faces cut and trimmed or do they do it themselves in front of the bathroom mirror with nail-scissors?”

“‘Hey, my spaghetti’s moving!’ cried Mr. Twit, poking around in it with his fork. ‘It’s a new kind,’ Mrs. Twit said, taking a mouthful from her own plate which of course had no worms. ‘It’s called Squiggly Spaghetti. It’s delicious. Eat it up while it’s nice and hot.’

“‘What’s happened?’ screamed Mrs. Twit. They stood in the middle of the room, looking up. All the furniture, the big table, the chairs, the sofa, the lamps, the little side tables, the cabinet with bottles of beer in it, the ornaments, the electric heater, the carpet, everything was stuck upside down to the ceiling. The pictures were upside down on the walls. And the floor they were standing on was absolutely bare. What’s more, it had been painted white to look like the ceiling.”

“Mrs. Twit may have been ugly and she may have been beastly, but she was not stupid.”

“Mrs. Twit came back and climbed into her bed and put out the light. She lay there in the dark scratching her tummy. Her tummy was itching. Dirty old hags like her always have itchy tummies.”

“If you looked closer still (hold your noses, ladies and gentlemen), if you peered deep into the moustachy bristles sticking out over his upper lip, you would probably see much larger objects that had escaped the wipe of his hand, things that had been there for months and months, like a piece of maggoty green cheese or a moldy old cornflake or even the slimy tail of a tinned sardine.”

“You can play a lot of tricks with a glass eye because you can take it out and pop it back in again any time you like. You can bet your life Mrs. Twit knew all the tricks.”

“To pay her back for the glass eye in his beer, Mr. Twit decided he would put a frog in Mrs. Twit’s bed. He caught a big one down by the pond and carried it back secretly in a box. That night when Mrs. Twit was in the bathroom getting ready for bed, Mr. Twit slipped the frog between her sheets. Then he got into his own bed and waited for the fun to begin.”

“But the funny thing is that Mrs. Twit wasn’t born ugly. She’d had quite a nice face when she was young. The ugliness had grown upon her year by year as she got older.”

“Suddenly, as Mr. Twit tipped the last drop of beer down his throat, he caught sight of Mrs. Twit’s awful glass eye staring up at him from the bottom of the mug. It made him jump. ‘I told you I was watching you,’ cackled Mrs. Twit. ‘I’ve got eyes everywhere so you’d better be careful.‘”

“As you know, an ordinary unhairy face like yours and mine simply gets a bit smudgy if it is not washed often enough, and there’s nothing so awful about that. But a hairy face is a very different matter. Things cling to hair, especially food. Things like gravy go right in among the hairs and stay there. You and I can wipe our smooth faces with a washcloth and we quickly look more or less all right again, but the hairy man cannot do that.”

“Nothing good shone out of Mrs. Twit’s face. In her right hand she carried a walking stick. She used to tell people that this was because she had warts growing on the sole of her left foot and walking was painful. But the real reason she carried a stick was so she could hit things with it, things like dogs and cats and small children.”

“What a lot of hairy-faced men there are around nowadays. When a man grows hair all over his face it is impossible to tell what he really looks like. Perhaps that’s why he does it. He’d rather you didn’t know.”

“...Mr. Twit never really went hungry. By sticking out his tongue and curling it sideways to explore the hairy jungle around his mouth, he was always able to find a tasty morsel here and there to nibble on.”