The Pigman Versions of Reality Quotes

[John:] Lorraine is panting to get at the typewriter now, and I'm going to let her before she has a heart attack. (1)

[Lorraine:] I should never have let John write the first chapter because he always has to twist things subliminally. I am not panting, and I am not about to have a thrombosis. (2)

[Lorraine:] The one big difference between John and me, besides the fact that he's a boy and I'm a girl, is I have compassion. Not that he really doesn't have any compassion, but he'd be the last one on earth to show it. He pretends he doesn't care about anything in the world, and he's always ready with some outrageous remark, but if you ask me, any real hostility he has is directed against himself. (2)

[Lorraine:] His [John's] eyes reminded me of a description of a gigantic Egyptian eye that was found in one of the pyramids I read about in a book on black magic. Somehow an archaeologist's wife ended up with this huge stone eye in her bedroom, and in the middle of the night it exploded and a big cat started biting the archaeologist's wife's neck. When she put the lights on, the cat was gone. Only the pieces of the eye were scattered all over the floor. That's what John's eyes remind me of. I knew even from the first moment I saw him he had to be something special. (2)

[John:] If anyone distorts, it's that mother of hers. The way her old lady talks you'd think Lorraine needed internal plastic surgery and seventeen body braces, but if you ask me, all she needs is a little confidence. (3)

[Lorraine:] I should have just left there and then because I knew things were going to get involved. I realize now there were plenty of bad omens within the next few minutes. If I'd had half a brain, I'd have Pogo-sticked it right out of there. (6)

[John:] I don't happen to buy all of Lorraine's stuff about omens. She talks about me distorting, but look at her. I mean, she thinks she can get away with her subliminal twists by calling them omens, but she doesn't fool me. The only difference between her fibs and mine are that hers are eerie—she's got a gift for saying things that make you anxious. (7)

[Lorraine:] There was one woman at Chambers Street who was talking to herself a mile a minute, and I know now it was another omen.

"Death is coming," she kept repeating. "God told me death is coming. He calls me his little chatty doll…God's chatty doll…."

It's sort of spooky how when you're caught talking to God nowadays everybody thinks you're nuts. They used to call you a prophet. (8)

[Lorraine:] I—and maybe now even the Pigman—were the only ones he [John] knew who could understand that doing something like roller-skating out of Beekman's was not absolutely crazy. Everything in his home had to have a purpose. There was no one there who could understand doing something just for fun—something crazy—and that was what he'd liked about me from that first day when I laughed on the bus and was just as crazy as he was. (8)

[Lorraine:] She's always warning me about getting into cars and things like that. When she goes to work on a night shift, she constantly reminds me to lock the doors and windows, and sometimes she calls on the phone if she gets a chance and tells me again. Beware of men is what she's really saying. They have dirty minds, and they're only after one thing. Rapists are roaming the earth. (10)

[Lorraine:] No customers were over by the peanut stand where that same old woman from the last visit was giving me the evil eye. Worst of all, she was putting peanuts into her mouth at the same rate Jane Appling had devoured the chocolate-covered ants. She really looked like the wrath of God, and I was too scared to go over and buy a package of peanuts for myself. (14)