Philippa Pearce > Quotes

“Nothing stands still, except in our memory.”
― Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

“A habit of solitude in early childhood is not easily broken. Indeed, it may prove lifelong.”
― Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

“Good-bye, Mrs Bartholemew," said tom, shaking hands with stiff politeness; "and thank you very much for having me."
"I shall look forward to our meeting again," said Mrs Bartholemew, equally primly.
Tom went slowly down the attic stairs. Then, at the bottom, he hesitated: he turned impulsively and ran up again - two at a time - to where Hatty Bartholemew still stood...
Afterwards, Aunt Gwen tried to describe to her husband that second parting between them. "He ran up to her, and they hugged each other as if they had known each other for years and years, instead of only having met for the first time this morning. There was something else, too, Alan, although I know you'll say it sounds even more absurd...Of course, Mrs Bartholemew's such a shrunken little old woman, she's hardly bigger than Tom; anyway: but, you know, he put his arms right round her and he hugged her good-bye as if she were a little girl.”
― Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

“You're very old, aren't you?"
"Just as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.”
― Philippa Pearce, A Finder's Magic

“...And you probably have little idea of how delicious - how toothsome - how scrumptious - they are when eaten fresh. Of course, I have my worm larder -" He corrected himself. "Worm larders, well stocked, but the earthworm pursued, or promptly pounced upon, and eaten fresh - as I've said - Ah! the earthworm, there's nothing like it! You can have your slugs and your wireworms and your leatherjackets and as many ground beetles as you like to eat - snap! crackle! crunch! You can have them all! There's nothing to equal the near liquefaction of worm meat as I pass its length through my fingers, sieving out the earth granules from the creature's incessant feeding. Or alternatively tear it to eat at once in great guzzling, gulping chunks.”
― Philippa Pearce, The Little Gentleman

“If you don't get it, you don't get it."
...
"If you don't get it, you may yet.”
― Philippa Pearce, A Finder's Magic

“He criss-crossed the kitchen-garden beyond the asparagus beds: fruit trees and strawberry beds and bean poles and a chicken-wire enclosure where raspberry canes and gooseberry bushes and currant bushes lived sheltered from the attack of birds. Beside the gooseberry wire grew a row of rhubarb. Each clump was covered with the end of an old tub or pot drain-pipe with sacking over the top. Between the loose staves of one of the tubends was something white—a piece of paper. It was folded, and addressed in a childish hand—if one could call it an address: ‘To Oberon, King of Fairies.’ Tom certainly did not want to be mixed up with talk of fairies and that kind of thing; and he moved very quickly away from the rhubarb bed.”
― Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

“1 am not “up to” anything, Cousin Edgar.”
― Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

“Hurry! whispered the house; and the grandfather clock at the heart of it beat an anxious tick, tick.”
― Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

“Hurry! hurry! the house seemed to whisper round him. The hour is passing … passing …”
― Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

“Mrs Bartholomew did not cry, because she had done all her crying for that so long ago.”
― Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

“Was his brother’s name Cain?’ asked Tom. Hatty pretended not to have heard him. This was particularly irritating to Tom, as it was what he had to suffer from all the other people in the garden. ‘Because the story of Cain and Abel is in the Bible, and Cain really killed Abel. I don’t believe this Abel who gardens here has anything to do with the Bible Abel—except that he was called after him. I don’t believe this Abel ever had a brother who tried to murder him.”
― Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

“But there are bars across the bottom of the window!’ he burst out. ‘This is a nursery! I’m not a baby!”
― Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

“When you're my age, Tom, you live in the Past a great deal. You remember it; you dream of it.”
― Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

“Sometimes he would doze, and then, in his half-dreaming, he became two persons, and one of him would not go to sleep but selfishly insisted on keeping the other awake with a little muttering monologue on whipped cream and shrimp sauce and rum butter and real mayonnaise and all the other rich variety of his diet nowadays.”
― Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

“I meant to ask Hatty questions about the garden,’ Tom wrote to Peter, ‘but somehow I forgot.’ He always forgot. In the daytime, in the Kitsons’ flat, he thought only of the garden, and sometimes he wondered about it: where it came from, what it all meant. Then he planned cunning questions to put to Hatty, that she would have to answer fully and without fancy; but each night, when he walked into the garden, he forgot to be a detective, and instead remembered only that he was a boy and this was the garden for a boy and that Hatty was his playmate.”
― Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden