topics: |  fiction | young-adult

Quotes

    "Daddy," she said, "do you think you could buy me a book?"
    "A book?" he said. "What d'you want a flaming book for?"
    "To read, Daddy."
    "What's wrong with the telly, for heaven's sake? We've got a lovely telly
with a twelve-inch screen and now you come asking for a book! You're getting
spoiled, my girl!"  p.12

Mr Wormwood, the Great Car Dealer

Her father was a dealer in second-hand cars and it seemed he did pretty well
at it.
   "Sawdust", he would say proudly, "is one of the great secrets of my success..."
   "I don't see how sawdust can help you to sell second-hand cars, daddy."
   "...I'm always glad to buy a car when some fool has been crashing the
gears so badly they're all worn out and rattle like mad. I get it cheap. Then
all I do is mix a lot of sawdust with the oil in the gearbox and it runs as
sweet as a nut."
   "How long will it run like that before it starts rattling again?" Matilda asked him.
   "Long enough for the buyer to get a good distance away," the father said,
grinning. "About a hundred miles."
   "But that's dishonest, daddy," Matilda said. "It's cheating."
   "No one ever got rich being honest," the father said. "Customers are there
to be diddled."

[mother: dyed platinum blonde]
She had one of those unfortunate bulging figures where the flesh appears to
be strapped in all around the body to prevent it from falling out.  27

[After Matilda has rimmed dad's hat w superglue and it has stuck to his
head.]
   Matilda said, "There's a boy down the road who got some superglue on his
finger without knowing it and then he put his finger to his nose."
   Mr. Wormwood jumped, "What happened to him?" he spluttered.
   "The finger got stuck inside his nose," Matilda said, "and he had to go
around like that for a week.  People kept saying to him, 'Stop picking your
nose,' and he couldn't do anything about it.  He looked an awful fool." 34

In came Mr. Wormwood in a loud check suit and a yellow tie.  The appalling
broad orange and green check of the jacket and trousers almost blinded the
onlooker.  50

[AM: ??Luddite tendencies in Roald Dahl:]
[Matilda has just multiplied 14 x 19 = 266.  Ms Honey does it on paper to
confirm.
Ms Honey: Try to tell me exactly what goes on inside your head when you get a
   multiplication like that ... you seem able to arrive at the answer almost
   instantly.
Matilda: I . . . I . . . I simply put the fourteen down in my head and multiply it
   by nineteen.  I'm afraid I don't know how else to explain it. I've always said to
   myself that if a little pocket calculator can do it why shouldn't I?
Ms H: Why not indeed.
Matilda: I think it's a lot better than a lump of metal.

   "Now look at me," Mrs. Wormwood said.  "Then look at you.  You chose
books. I chose looks."
   Ms Honey looked at the plain plump person with the smug suet-pudding
face... "What did you say?" she asked.
   "I said you chose books and I chose looks.  And who's finished up the
better off?  Me, of course.  I'm sitting pretty in a nice house with a
successful businessman and you're left slaving away teaching a lot of nasty
little children the ABC. " 98

[Lavender has secretly put a newt in Mrs Trunchbull's water jug]
The Trunchbull was sitting behind the teacher's table staring with a mixture
of horror and fascination at the newt wriggling in the glass. Matilda's eyes
were also riveted on the glass. And now, quite slowly, there began to creep
over Matilda a most extraordinary and peculiar feeling. The feeling was
mostly in the eyes. A kind of electricity seemed to be gathering inside
them. A sense of power was brewing in those eyes of hers, a feeling of great
strength was settling itself deep inside her eyes. But there was also another
feeling which was something else altogether, and which she could not
understand. It was like flashes of lightning. Little waves of lightning
seemed to be flashing out of her eyes. Her eyeballs were beginning to get
hot, as though vast energy was building up somewhere inside them. It was an
amazing sensation. She kept her eyes steadily on the glass, and now the power
was concentrating itself in one small part of each eye and growing stronger
and stronger and it felt as though millions of tiny little invisible arms
with hands on them were shooting out of her eyes towards the glass she was
staring at.

    "Tip it!" Matilda whispered. "Tip it over!"

    She saw the glass wobble. It actually tilted backwards a fraction of an
inch, then righted itself again.
    She kept pushing at it with all those millions of invisible little arms
and hands that were reaching out from her eyes, feeling the power that
was flashing straight from the two little black dots in the very centres of
her eyeballs.
    "Tip it!" she whispered again. "Tip it over!"
[eventually]
    And then, very very slowly, so slowly she could hardly see it happening,
the glass began to lean backwards, farther and farther and farther backwards
until it was balancing on just one edge of its base. And there it teetered
for a few seconds before finally toppling over and falling with a sharp
tinkle on to the desktop.  The water in it and the squirming newt splashed
out all over Miss Trunchbull's enormous bosom. The headmistress let out a
yell that must have rattled every window-pane in the building and for the
second time in the last five minutes she shot out of her chair like a
rocket. 166

her mouth was opening and shutting like a halibut out of water and giving out
a series of strangled gasps.

"Did you know", Matilda said suddenly, "that the heart of a mouse beats at
the rate of six hundred and fifty times a second?" 231

Do illustrations spoil the ending?

After the newt glass spills over, one is not sure it's Matilda; in the
experiment by Ms. Honey, one isn't sure if the empty glass will topple or
not, but the illustration spills the beans (p.175).  Still, one is waiting to
read how it goes.