Illusion vs. Reality Theme Analysis

‘The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of production that counts. And stories—well—they’re just another product, like carpets and chairs, and no one cares how you produce them so long as you deliver the goods.’

‘For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. [...] There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.’

‘Where?’

‘In the “word-memory” section,’ he said, epexegetically.

Give us strength, Oh Lord, to let our children starve.

America is the land of opportunities for women. Already they own about eighty-four per cent of the wealth of the nation. Soon they will have it all.

‘I’m afraid you mustn’t expect anything else for Christmas. Fifty dollars was rather more than I was going to spend anyway.’

It seemed he was already trying to make something out of this, and to embarrass the boy, and at the same time I had the feeling he was relishing a private little secret all on his own.

[...] and in one corner he spotted a large parrot in a cage. Animals were usually a good sign in a place like this, Billy told himself.

‘I stuff all my little pets myself when they pass away. Will you have another cup of tea?’

‘No, thank you,’ Billy said. The tea tasted faintly of bitter almonds, and he didn’t much care for it.

‘And then there’s the patina,’ Mr. Boggis continued.

‘The what?’

He explained to them the meaning of this word as applied to furniture.

‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ he said, straightening up, wiping his brow. ‘That was a bloody good carpenter put this job together and I don’t care what the parson says.’

‘This will be a good lesson to you,’ she went on. ‘Never rush things. Always take your time when you are summing someone up. Then you’ll never make mistakes.’

‘There he goes,’ I said. ‘Look.’

‘Where?’

‘Over there. He’s crossing the street. Goodness, Mummy, what a hurry he’s in.’

I had a feeling that they were laughing at us, laughing at the smallness of our numbers and at the hopeless courage of the pilots. I felt that it was the mountains, not us, who were the clever ones.

‘I don’t care what it is,’ she said. ‘You can’t go putting foreign bodies like that into a tiny baby’s milk. You must be mad.’

‘It’s perfectly harmless, Mabel, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. It comes from bees.’

In his heart he knew that he was not really much more than a bookmaker [...] and he knew that his friends knew it, too. So he was seeking now to become a man of culture, to cultivate a literary and aesthetic taste, to collect paintings, music, books, and all the rest of it.

‘Why the study?’

‘Acquiring room temperature, of course. It’s been there twenty-four hours.’

‘But why the study?’

‘It’s the best place in the house. Richard helped me choose it last time he was here.’

The nostrils for example were very odd, somehow more open, more flaring than any I had seen before, and excessively arched. This gave the whole nose a kind of open, snorting look that had something of the wild animal about it—the mustang.