Wise Children Quotation Bank

Fairytale allusions
“once upon a time”
“Cinders, you shall go to the ball”
“happy ending”
“like a wicked fairy in Sleeping beauty”

Magic Realism
“with whom by a bizarre coincidence, he shares a birthday”
“Why didn’t they kill the transmission there and then?”
“she’s got a fish bowl on her head with a fish in it, I kid you not”
“welcome to the land of make believe”
“sometimes if I look hard enough I can see back into the past”

Theatre Language
“I made my bow”
“came a short intermission”
“the curtain call of my career as a lover”
“the final curtain”
“freeze frame”
“pause”
“press play”

Pathetic Fallacy
“ the sun disappeared and all was cold and grey”

Twins
“like as two peas”
“like as two water drops”
“she said ‘yes’ to life and I said ‘maybe..’”
“identical all well and good but Siamese no”
“put us together and people blinked”
“if one of us dyed, do did the other”
“I did what Nora wanted because I loved her best”
“Melchior was all out for art and Peregrine was all out for fun”
“they’d hated on another’s guts”
“a team at last”

Identity
“she’d invented herself”
“not that I knew her…but we read the paper”
“I found that I could kiss the boys”
“I wanted to look like myself”
“I was not the Dora he’d fallen for”
“they mix me up with Nora”
“we were a pretty girl”
“he didn’t know us well enough to smell the difference”
“we hadn’t just lost Grandma either. She was the only witness of the day our mother died when we were born”
“we were about to change our entire personality”

Carnivalesque
“Life’s a carnival”
“the carnivals got to stop sometime”
“News? What news?”
“wars are facts we cannot **** away, nor laugh away”

Sexuality
“you’ve got to have something to cuddle”
“the only brief encounter you had during the war was a fling with a Yank behind a public convenience on Liverpool Street Station”
“have you got anything in the shape of a cucumber”
“since he got Nora in her altogether expect for her nail polish”
“she smiles a lot, she shows her tits”
“our paternal grandmothers enthusiasm for ahem indoor sports”

Phallic symbols
“great, tall, butch, horny, mahogany thing”
“Have you got anything in the shape of a cucumber?”

Bodily Functions
“one of your feet is bound to be bigger than the other”
“one ear will leak more wax”
“Nora is fluxy; me constipated”
“her menstrual flow was copious to a fault, mine, meagre”

Humour
“we can still lift a leg higher then your average dog if called for”
“come of it you sentimental sod”
“ere Dor’ smashing name for a lingerie shop – Brief Encounter”
“I don’t give a monkey’s”
“two batty old hags, buy us a drink and we’ll sing you a song”
“freeze and finally snuff it”

Perry
“although our cyn, the worldly one, thought that Perry was our father”
“Perry might be errant but did his duty all the same”
“our uncle Perry did possess a fault…his boredom threshold”
“for him life had to be a continuous succession of small treats or else he couldn’t see the point”
“Perry was the size of a polar bear”

Maternity and Paternity
“Grandma looked out for us not out of duty but out of pure love”
“Melchior did the biologically necessary but Peregrine passed as out father”
“it’s a wise child that knows its own father, but wiser yet the father that knows its own children”
“how a mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a moveable feast”
“mother is as mother does”
“’Father’ is a hypothesis but ‘mother’ is a fact”
“there’s more to fathering then ****ing you know”
“there’s a gigantic question mark over the question of their paternity”

Unreliability of Dora
“if you get the little details like that right, people will believe anything”
“I misremember. It was sixty odd years ago”
“at my age memory becomes exquisitively selective”
“I could have sworn that…”
“these days, half a century and more later, I might think I did not live but dreamed that night”

Artificiality/Reality
“we always painted an inch thick”
“habit of applying war paint”

Art mirroring life
“he shot them both and then he shot himself”
“a hand-made, custom built replica, a wonder of the plastic surgeons art”

Key message
“hope for the best, expect the worst”
“what a joy it is to sing and dance”

Scroll to see replies

Reply 1

m90

That's so helpful to all the people studying this!

Also note the amount of wind references Carter uses throughout the novel. ie. when D&N are born, when Tristram arrives, etc etc. There's tons, basically when something is about to happen there's WIND!!

Reply 2

little one

oo nice... didn't ever think of that...

Reply 3

thats_my_poison

Ive got a massive quotation bank for when i studied wise children if people want me to post it up. im warning you tho, it is LONG

Reply 4

little one

would be useful :smile:

i cant seem to pass this exam :frown:

Reply 5

thats_my_poison

tell me what characters/themes you want because i have about 15 pages of quotes and the website would prob crash if i tried pasting it all up lol.

dont worry about the exam. i know closed book exam sounds really daunting but trust me, there are loads of quotes that you just already know.

Reply 6

little one

this is the third time im sitting this paper :frown:

bored of it!

hmm.. stuff on saskia and imogen, anything on settings?

Reply 7

m90

diamonds_glitter_trauma_tears

Ive got a massive quotation bank for when i studied wise children if people want me to post it up. im warning you tho, it is LONG

Those quotations would be really useful, would you mind emailing them to me? I'll private message you my email once you've replied to this...

:smile:

Reply 8

Cristiano12

Hey guys, because the exam q for last time was on the importance on Shakespeare, is it safe to say that this question would not appear again on fri? I am pushing against time here and I have realised that there is alot of quotations and theory to revise in the influence of Shakespeare to Wise Children so do you reckon I can skip the importance of Shakespeare in Wise Children and still be safe? (That said, I still have a understanding of how Shakespeare plays a part in the novel, just not in detail)

Reply 9

little one

yeah, im not revising ol' shakespeare

Reply 10

m90

I'm finding learning all these quotes so hard :mad:

Well, not hard... it's just there's so many!!

Reply 11

TotalMisfit[HJ]//xo

Awesome quotation bank.
I'm soo worried about this exam, I haven't even bothered to revise for my other two texts (Larkin & Oscar Wilde) because I've got myself so worked up about Wise Children.
Aaaaggghhh!!!

Reply 12

little one

tell me about it - i got E first time round last summer, then C when i resat the exam in january....now what :frown:

Reply 13

~x~FairyDust~x~

I'm resitting this exam too, although I got a high B last time so have no idea why, I blame my teacher for going on and on about how it would be a good idea! Argh, I'm never going to come close to that agian, it was a fluke last time. I'm seriously considering not even turning up to the exam, I actually hate this book beyond belief!

/Ok, rant over. Lol :redface:

Reply 14

Circa1892

It stuck out like a chapel hat peg, what did, what do you think, there was a clear drop of moisture on the tip and it came to me to lick it off...

All I can remember from this book...

Reply 15

little one

thanks ~x~FairyDust~x~ :smile:

Reply 16

m90

Circa1892

It stuck out like a chapel hat peg, what did, what do you think, there was a clear drop of moisture on the tip and it came to me to lick it off...

All I can remember from this book...