MISTER PIP
THEMES AND QUOTES
LEARNING INTENTION(S)
• To analyse some quotes related to our key themes
ESCAPISM
• “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.”
• “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. ”
• “Dreams are nervy things—all it takes is for one stern word to be spoken in their
direction and they shrivel up and die. ”
CULTURE
• “Above all, he said, white is a feeling.”
• This wasn't Mr. Watts' story we were hearing at all. It wasn't his or Grace's story. It was a
made-up story to which we'd all contributed. Mr. Watts was shining our experience of
the world back at us. We had no mirrors. These things and anything else that might have
said something about who we were and what we believed had been thrown onto the
bonfire. I have come to think that Mr. Watts was giving back something of ourselves in the
shape of a story.
• It taught me you can slip under the skin of another just as easily as your own,
• PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK ME "Why Dickens?," which I always take to be a gentle
rebuke. I point to the one book that supplied me with another world at a time when it
was desperately needed. It gave me a friend in Pip. It taught me you can slip under the
skin of another just as easily as your own, even when that skin is white and belongs to a
boy alive in Dickens' England. Now, if that isn't an act of magic I don't know what is.
• Mr. Dickens had taught every one of us kids that our voice was special, and we should
remember this whenever we used it, and remember that whatever else happened to us in
our lives our voice could never be taken away from us.