Tom Long Quotes

“Tom had few ideas on the causes and cures of sleeplessness, and it never occurred to him to complain. At first he tried to read himself to sleep with Aunt Gwen’s schoolgirl stories. They did not even bore him enough for that...”

″‘Really, there’s nothing to see.’ Nothing... only this: a great lawn where flowerbeds bloomed...”

“I’d rather have had measles with Peter- much rather!”

“His aunt and uncle would certainly do all they could to stop him; they did not want him to use the garden, else why had they kept him in the dark about its very existence.”

“Tom knew that he was in the wrong, of course, but they need not have made such a fuss. Aunt Gwen was most upset because, if Tom slipped into the larder at night, that meant he was hungry. She was not feeding him properly.”

“Tom had been preparing himself to play the grateful guest; but- ‘But there are bars across the bottom of the window!’ he burst out. ‘This is a nursery! I’m not a baby!‘”

“But he’ll never even try to beat me, I know; and Aunt Gwen- she’s worse, because she’s a child-lover, and she’s kind.”

“The stillness had become an expectant one; the house seemed to hold is breath; the darkness pressed up to him, pressing him with a question: Come on, Tom, the clock has struck thirteen- what are you going to do about it?”

″‘It’s the worst hole I’ve ever been in,’ he wrote, in imagination. ‘I’d do anything to get out of it, Peter- to be somewhere else- anywhere.‘”