Small island key quotes Flashcards
Hostility towards Gilbert in the cinema Chapter 17
•‘You’re nothing but trouble’
• ‘even in RAF blue my coloured skin can permit anyone to treat me less than a man’
• ‘’Enunciating as if talking to an imbecile’
Chapter 14 Gilbert in US Army base
‘All these words had been used to characterise me in the last few minutes. Insults every one’
Chapter 30 Gilbert working in the post office insults
•‘When are you going back to the jungle?’
• ‘We can’t use your sort’
• ‘Speak English’
• ‘There’s decent Englishmen that should be doing your job’
Chapter 30 Gilbert feeling ashamed after dealing with racism
•‘What a forlorn desire to seek indifference’
• ‘aching shame stooped me double’
Mr Todd/ British attitudes towards immigrants
• ‘this country no longer feels like his own’
• ‘Hitler invading couldn’t have been any worse’
•’animal desires’
• ‘We’ll have a devil of a time getting rid of them now’
Hortense’s disillusionment chapter 2
• ‘You make me come here and live like an animal?’
• ‘her mouth gaping like a simpleton’s’
Hortense’s childish naïvety in chapter 1
‘ding a ling’ ‘But there was no answer’
Gilbert’s disillusionment about the Mother country chapter 12
‘how come England did not know me?’
‘Leave home, leave familiar, leave love’
Hortense gets rejected from teaching position chapter 50
Gilbert - ‘This is not the way that England work’
‘You’re not qualified to teach here in England’
‘Every organ I possessed screamed on this woman’
Chapter 51: Hortense’s realisation of the reality of England
‘Hortense reeling wounded after a sharp slap from the Mother Country’s hand’
‘I have found that this is a very cold country’
Hortense’s dialect, out with Queenie
•‘Tired of this silly dance of miscomprehension’
•‘At college my diction was admired by all’
•Wonders why the working clas speak so ‘coarse’
Chapter 59 confrontation between Gilbert and Bernard
(Gilbert about race) White. No better, no worse than me, just white
Anecdotes chapter 12
• Curtis was told ‘his skin was too dark to worship there’
• Eugene was ‘taken away’ wrongly for ‘attacking an old lady’
• Louis believed ‘bloodyforeigner’ to be all one word
Chapter 12 Gilbert’s disillusionment
‘All us pitiful West Indian dreamers who sailed with heads bursting with foolishness were a joke’ (to his cousin)
Gilbert about taking the baby chapter 59
‘Leave that little coloured baby alone in this country, full of people like Mr Bligh. What sort of life would that little man have?’
