Quotes from Mister Pip

“I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is where I’d found him – not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates. ”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“I do not know what you are supposed to do with memories likes these. It feels wrong to want to forget. Perhaps this is why we write these things down, so we can move on.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“For six days I didn’t get up except to make a cup of tea, or fry an egg, or lie in the skinny bath gazing at a cracked ceiling. The days punished me with their slowness, piling up the hours on me, spreading their joylessness about the room.

A doctor would have said I was suffering from depression. Everything I have read since suggests this was the case. But when you are in the grip of something like that it doesn’t usefully announce itself. No. what happens is you sit in a dark, dark cave, and you wait. If you are lucky there is a pinprick of light, and if you are especially lucky that pinprick will grow larger and larger, until one day the cave appears to slip behind, and just like that you find yourself in daylight and free. This is how it happened for me.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“I was eleven when my father left, so neither of us really knew our fathers. I’d met mine of course, but then I only knew my dad as a child knows a parent, as a sort of crude outline filled in with one or two colors. I’d never seen my father scared or cry. I’d never heard him admit to any wrongdoing. I have no idea what he dreamed of. And once I’d seen a smile pinned to one cheek and darkness to the other when my mum had yelled at him. Now he was gone, and I was left with just an impression—one of male warmth, big arms, and loud laughter.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“Dreams are nervy things—all it takes is for one stern word to be spoken in their direction and they shrivel up and die. ”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“A Prayer was like a tickle.Sooner or later God would have to look down to see what was tickling his bum.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“Dreams are private, she said. And she is right. A dream is a story that no one else will get to hear or read.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“Stories have a job to do. They can't just lie around like lazybone dogs. They have to teach you something.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“We have all lost our possessions and many of us our homes," he said. "But these losses, severe though they may seem, remind us of what no person can take, and that is our minds and our imaginations.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“Let’s all do it,” said Mr. Watts. “Close your eyes and silently recite your name.”
The sound of my name took me to a place deep inside my head. I already knew that words could take you into a new world, but I didn’t know that on the strength of one word spoken for my ears only I would find myself in a room that no one else knew about.

“Another thing,” Mr. Watts said. “No one in the history of your short lives has used the same voice as you with which to say your name. This is yours. Your special gift that no one can ever take from you.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“I could have run after him. I could have asked politely for some clarification. But I didn’t I knew what I preferred, and that was—I didn’t want to know. Rather, I wanted to believe.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“As we watched the soldiers and the Rambo disappear I remember feeling preternaturally calm. This is what deep, deep fear does to you. It turns you into a state of unfeeling.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“Under these circumstances, silence among such a large group of people is an uncomfortable thing to experience. Guilt spreads around even to those who have nothing to feel guilty about. Many held their breath. Or, as I heard later, many did what me and my mum did and closed their eyes. We closed our eyes in a bid to remove ourselves.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“I had discovered that the plainest house can crown a fantasy or daydream. An open window can be tolerated. So can an open door. But I discovered the value of four walls and a roof. Something about containment that at the same time offers escape.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“I suppose it is possible to be all of these things. To sort of fall out of who you are into another, as well as to journey back to some essential sense of self. We only see what we see.

He was whatever he needed to be, what we asked him to be. Perhaps there are lives like that—they pour into whatever space we have made ready for them to fill.
”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“The surprising thing is where I’d found him – not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“Thanks to dreams, in the history of the galaxy the world has been reinvented more often than there are stars.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“Now listen. Faith is like oxygen. It keeps you afloat at all times. Sometimes you need it. Sometimes you don’t. but when you do need it you better be practiced at having faith, otherwise it won’t work. That’s why the missionaries built all the churches. Before we got those churches we weren’t practicing enough. That’s what prayers are for—practice, children. Practice.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“Some areas of life are not meant to overlap.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“You cannot read Dickens without putting in a little more effort. You cannot eat a ripe pawpaw without its innards and juice spilling down your chin. Likewise, the language of Dickens makes your mouth do strange things, and when you're not used to his words your jaw will creak.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“We were young. Everyone was young in those days. That’s the main complaint you hear from people who are getting old. You stop seeing young people. You begin to wonder if there are any left and whether there were only young people when you were young.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“I was one of those heart seeds us kids had heard about in class. I was at some earlier stage of a journey that would deliver me to another place, to another life, into another way of being. I just didn't know where or when.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“Pip is an orphan who is given the chance to create his own self and destiny. Pip's experience also reminds us of the emigrant's experience. Each leaves behind the place he grew up in. Each strikes out on his own. Each is free to create himself anew. Each is also free to make mistakes...”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“She didn't want to encourage me by asking questions. She didn't want me to go deeper into that other world. She worried she would lose her Matilda to Victorian England.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“We were not sure how to receive them, even though they were our boys.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“Above all, he said, white is a feeling.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“.. you cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames. For me. Matilda, Great Expectations is such a book. It gave me permission to change my life.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

“But you know, Matilda, you cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames. For me, Matilda, Great Expectations is such a book. It gave me permission to change my life.”
― Lloyd Jones, quote from Mister Pip

Video

About the author

Popular quotes

“This business I'm in is different. It's special. The people around me feel like brothers and sisters. We hardly know each other, but we're that close; somehow there's been an immediate bonding between total strangers. We share each other's triumphs, and when one of us gets hurt, we all bleed - it's corny, I know, but it's true. I've never experienced anything like this before. It's great. It turns up the heat in life.”
― Johnny Cash, quote from Cash

“She realized all at once the deeper thing that bothered her, the thing that made him not just irritating but intolerable: how he kept loving her blindly when she deserved it so little. ”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood

“And now, born from the ashes, she’s a warrior in bloodied black.”
― Amie Kaufman, quote from Gemina

“I could almost see common sense and denial fighting away at each other within her. In the end, denial won, as it so often does.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book

“He was a boom boom shake the room " kind of guy”
― Saira Viola, quote from Slide, a Modern Satire on the Excess of Greed

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.