White Teeth Appearances Quotes

Irie Jones was obsessed. Occasionally her worried mother cornered her in the hallway before she slunk out of the door, picked at her elaborate corsetry, asked, "What's up with you? What in the Lord's name are you wearing? How can you breathe? Irie, my love, you're fine—you're just built like an honest-to-God Bowden—don't you know you're fine?"

But Irie didn't know she was fine. There was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection. A stranger in a stranger land. (11.5-6)

Naturally, there was a uniform. They each dripped gold and wore bandanas, either wrapped around their foreheads or tied at the joint of an arm or leg. The trousers were enormous, swamping things, the left leg always inexplicably rolled up to the knee; the sneakers were equally spectacular, with tongues so tall they obscured the entire ankle; baseball caps were compulsory, low slung and irremovable; and everything, everything, everything was Nike™; wherever the five of them went the impression they left behind was of one gigantic swoosh, one huge mark of corporate approval. And they walked in a very particular way, the left side of their bodies assuming a kind of loose paralysis that needed carrying along by the right side; a kind of glorified, funky limp like the slow, padding movement that Yeats imagined for his rough millennial beast. (9.185)

He shuffled through the restaurant with his eyes to the ground. If aunts and uncles phoned, he deflected questions or simply lied. Millat? He is in Birmingham, working in the mosque, yes, renewing his faith. Magid? Yes, he is marrying soon, yes, a very good young man, wants a lovely Bengali girl, yes, upholder of traditions, yes. (16.34)

For there were those who were quietly pleased that Alsana Iqbal, with her big house and her blacky-white friends and her husband who looked like Omar Sharif and her son who spoke like the Prince of Wales, was now living in doubt and uncertainty like the rest of them, learning to wear misery like old familiar silk. There was a certain satisfaction in it, even as Zinat (who never revealed her role in the deed) reached over the chair arm to take Alsana's hand in her sympathetic claws. (9.8)

"Why must you go an' say tings like dat, hmm? You wan' 'im to tink you some devilish heathen gal? Why kyan you say stamp-collecting or some ting? Come on, I gat to clean deez plates—finish up." (15.94)

But the question was unnecessary; even as the words formed in her mouth, Irie had already put two and two together. The midnight voice. The perfect daytime straightness and whiteness.

Clara hurriedly stretched to the floor and pried her teeth from Irie's foot and, as it was too late for disguise now, placed them directly on the bedside table. (14.74-75)

"What have you done? You had beautiful hair, man. All curly and wild. It was gorgeous."

Irie couldn't say anything for a moment. She had not considered the possibility that she looked anything less than terrific. (11.187-188)

"Well, Captain Jones, it would be an honor if you would lead the expedition up the hill."

"Captain—what? Blimey, no, you've got it arse-ways-up," said Archie, escaping the magnetic force of the eye, and refocusing on himself, dressed in Dickinson-Smith's shiny buttoned uniform.

"I'm not a bloody—"

"The lieutenant and I would be pleased to take charge," broke in a voice behind him. "We've been out of the action for quite a while. It is about time we got back in the thick of it, as they say."

Samad had stepped out onto the front steps silently as a shadow, in another of Dickinson-Smith's uniforms and with a cigarette hanging casually off his lower lip like a sophisticated sentence. He was always a good-looking boy, and dressed in the shiny buttons of authority this was only accentuated; in the sharp daylight, framed by the church door, he cut quite an awesome figure. (5.202-206)

Two sons. One invisible and perfect, frozen at the pleasant age of nine, static in a picture frame while the television underneath him spewed out all the s*** of the eighties—Irish bombs, English riots, transatlantic stalemates—above which mess the child rose untouchable and unstained, elevated to the status of ever-smiling Buddha, imbued with serene Eastern contemplation; capable of anything, a natural leader, a natural Muslim, a natural chief—in short, nothing but an apparition. A ghostly daguerreotype formed from the quicksilver of the father's imagination, preserved by the salt solution of maternal tears. This son stood silent, distant, and was "presumed well," like one of Her Majesty's colonial island outposts, stuck in an eternal state of original naiveté, perpetual prepubescence. This son Samad could not see. And Samad had long learned to worship what he could not see. (9.42)

Fifteen years later and Joyce would still challenge anyone to show her a happier marriage than hers. Three more children had followed Joshua: Benjamin (fourteen), Jack (twelve), and Oscar (six), bouncy, curly-haired boys, all articulate and amusing. The Inner Life of Houseplants (1984) and a college chair for Marcus had seen them through the eighties' boom and bust, financing an extra bathroom, a conservatory, and life's pleasures: old cheese, good wine, winters in Florence. (12.7)