Christina’s Reviews > The Giant, O'Brien > Status Update

'Put away the dark lantern and the hooks. Coil the rope ladder, and roll up the sacks. Clean your shovel before you stow it; you'll be wanting it again.'

'Howison has been reading a book about werewolves. ... The English do not have werewolves. For them, you're either one thing or the other.'

'It is the dead themselves who move him to tears. Numb to the scents of a hot summer's evening; deaf to laughter, blind to clouds. Not just still, and not just cold, but waxen, quenched, extinct—and gone . . . gone where? This is what anguishes him: the question where. He wants to haul them back, with iron hooks. He wants to question them: where?'

'Yet did they not give him a post at St. Georges' Hospital, and a little house to go with it? Later, St. Georges' elected him a governor, but by now he was possessed by a great interest in gunshot wounds, an interest that he found hard to indulge, so near to Hyde Park. It was a defect in Londoners, that they did not shoot each other enough.'

"Giants are extinct here for hundred of years."...
"It may be that they were shut up and starved, or hunted with large dogs. The Englishman craves novelty, as long as it will pack and decamp by the end of the week. he does not like his peace disturbed; it is the English peace, and he thinks it is sacred. Hi magnifies his own qualities, and does not like anyone to be bigger than himself."

'His father, fifty when he was born and suffering with the gravel, frequently hit him across the the ear. Mostly; whenever he saw him. This went on until he was thirteen, when his father died. By then, he had acquired a high-shouldered look, and a habit of trying to see behind him.'