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Peter Pan: The Complete Adventures by J.M. Barrie
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“The man was not wholly evil; he loved flowers (I have been told) and sweet music (he was himself no mean performer on the harpsichord);”
― J.M. Barrie
“She let her hands play in the hair of the tragic boy. She was not a little girl heart-broken about him; she was a grown woman smiling at it all, but they were wet smiles.”
― J.M. Barrie
“My dog knows very little, but what little he does know he knows extraordinarily well.”
― J.M. Barrie
“Mrs. Darling was married in white, and at first she kept the books perfectly, almost gleefully, as if it were a game, not so much as a brussels sprout was missing; but by and by whole cauliflowers dropped out, and instead of them there were pictures of babies without faces. She drew them when she should have been totting up. They were Mrs. Darling’s guesses.”
― J.M. Barrie
“Never, never!” she answered with conviction, “he would have been afraid.” “What is afraid?” asked Peter longingly. He thought it must be some splendid thing. “I do wish you would teach me how to be afraid, Maimie,” he said.”
― J.M. Barrie
“She adored all beautiful things in their every curve and fragrance, so that they became part of her. Day by day, she gathered beauty; had she had no heart (she who was the bosom of womanhood) her thoughts would still have been as lilies, because the good is the beautiful. And”
― J.M. Barrie
“She was the thing we call romance, which lives in the little hut beyond the blue haze of the pine-woods. No”
― J.M. Barrie
“Then tell her,’ Wendy begged, ‘to put out her light.’ ‘She can’t put it out. That is about the only thing fairies can’t do. It just goes out of itself when she falls asleep, same as the stars.’ ‘Then”
― J.M. Barrie
“She was all on a noble scale, her attributes were so generous, her manner unconquerably gracious, her movements indolently active, her face so candid that you must swear her every thought lived always in the open.”
― J.M. Barrie
“I loved even her naughtinesses, as when she stamped her foot at me, which she could not do without also gnashing her teeth, like a child trying to look fearsome. How pretty was that gnashing of her teeth! All her tormentings of me turned suddenly into sweetnesses, and who could torment like this exquisite fury, wondering in sudden flame why she could give herself to anyone, while I wondered only why she could give herself to me.”
― J.M. Barrie
“She came to me slowly; no incomprehensible thing to me now, but transparent as a pool, and so restful to look upon that she was a bath to the eyes, like banks of moss. Because”
― J.M. Barrie
“In his absence things are usually quiet on the island. The fairies take an hour longer in the morning, the beasts attend to their young, the redskins feed heavily for six days and nights, and when pirates and lost boys meet they merely bite their thumbs at each other. But with the coming of Peter, who hates lethargy, they are all under way again: if you put your ear to the ground now, you would hear the whole island seething with life. On”
― J.M. Barrie
“The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on; and when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out; but at this time there were six of them, counting the twins as two.”
― J.M. Barrie
“Fifteen paid the penalty for their crimes that night; but two reached the shore: Starkey to be captured by the redskins, who made him nurse for all their papooses, a melancholy come-down for a pirate; and Smee, who henceforth wandered about the world in his spectacles, making a precarious living by saying he was the only man that Jas. Hook had feared. Wendy,”
― J.M. Barrie
“They are forbidden by Peter to look in the least like him, and they wear the skins of bears slain by themselves, in which they are so round and furry that when they fall they roll. They have therefore become very sure-footed.”
― J.M. Barrie
“Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose.”
― J.M. Barrie
“for things go briskly on the island, come the pirates on their track. We hear them before they are seen, and it is always the same dreadful song: ‘Avast belay, yo ho, heave to, A-pirating we go, And if we’re parted by a shot We’re sure to meet below!’ A”
― J.M. Barrie
“He was never more sinister than when he was most polite, which is probably the truest test of breeding; and the elegance of his diction, even when he was swearing, no less than the distinction of his demeanour, showed him one of a different caste from his crew. A man of indomitable courage, it was said of him that the only thing he shied at was the sight of his own blood, which was thick and of an unusual colour.”
― J.M. Barrie
“Of all delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest and most compact; not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed.”
― J.M. Barrie
“Wall-flower juice is good for reviving dancers who fall to the ground in a fit, and Solomon’s Seals juice is for bruises. They bruise very easily”
― J.M. Barrie
“in his mouth he had a holder of his own contrivance which enabled him to smoke two cigars at once. But undoubtedly the grimmest part of him was his iron claw. Let”
― J.M. Barrie
“they gave him power to fly was this: They all tickled him on the shoulder, and soon he felt a funny itching in that part and then up he rose higher and higher and flew away out of the Gardens and over the house-tops. It”
― J.M. Barrie
“He was accompanied by a strange light, no bigger than your fist, which darted about the room like a living thing;”
― J.M. Barrie
“the redskins, every one of them with his eyes peeled. They carry tomahawks and knives, and their naked bodies gleam with paint and oil. Strung around them are scalps, of boys as well as of pirates, for these are the Piccaninny tribe, and not to be confused with the softer-hearted”
― J.M. Barrie
“He was a lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees; but the most entrancing thing about him was that he had all his first teeth.”
― J.M. Barrie
“knew an east-wind from a west-wind by its smell, and he could see the grass growing and hear the insects walking about inside the tree-trunks.”
― J.M. Barrie
“Yo ho, yo ho, the pirate life, The flag o’ skull and bones, A merry hour, a hempen rope, And hey for Davy Jones.’ At”
― J.M. Barrie
“The truth is that there was a something about Peter which goaded the pirate captain to frenzy. It was not his courage, it was not his engaging appearance, it was not–. There is no beating about the bush, for we know quite well what it was, and have got to tell. It was Peter’s cockiness. This”
― J.M. Barrie