1. IMPORTANT QUOTES
The importance of the book Great Expectations on the children:
"Mr. Watts had given us kids another piece of the world. I found I could go back to it as often
as I liked."
"No one had told us kids...that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another
place with marshes.."
"Great Expectations came between us" (Matilda's thoughts about her relationship with Dolores)
At some point I felt myself enter the story..I wasn't identifiable on the page, but I was
there...I knew that orphaned white kid and that small, fragile place he squeezed into... because
the same space came to exist between Mr. Watts and my mum. And I knew I would have to
choose between the two."
"I picked up a stick and in big letters scratched PIP into the sand. I did it above the high-tide
line and stuck white heart seeds into the groove of the letters of his name."
"I knew things could change because they had for Pip. ..we learned how a life could change
without any warning."
"..we would still have another country to flee to. And that would save our sanity."
"Now I knew fear as Pip had known it when Magwitch threatened to eat his heart and liver...I
felt singled out by this darkness that had descended over our lives."
Importance of literature
"I do not know what you are supposed to do with memories like these. It feels wrong to want to
forget. Perhaps this is why we write these things down, so we can move on."
Integrity / heroism
"A gentleman is a man who never forgets his manners, no matter the situation...A gentleman will
always do the right thing."
Mr. Watts pretending to be Mr. Pip "He had taken that identity to protect Daniel."
"He said that to be human is to be moral, and you cannot have a day off when it suits. My brave
mum had known this when she stepped forward to proclaim herself God's witness to the cold-
blooded butchery of her old enemy, Mr. Watts."
Identity / Memory
"These losses, severe though they may seem, remind us of what no person can take, and that is
our minds and our imaginations." (Mr. Watts)
"No one in the history of your short lives has used the same voice as you with which to say your
name. This is yours. Your special gift that no one can ever take from you."
"I suppose it is possible to be all of these things. To sort of fall out of who you are into another,
as well as to journey back to some essential sense of self. We only see what we see.I only know
the man who took us kids by the hand and taught us how to re-imagine the world, and to see the

2. possibility of change, to welcome it into our live."
"He was whatever he needed to be, what we asked him to be. Perhaps there are lives like that -
they pour into whatever space we have made ready for them to fill. We needed a teacher, Mr.
Watts became that teacher. We needed a magician to conjure up other worlds, and Mr. Watts
had become that magician. When we needed a saviour, Nr. Watts had filled that role. When the
redskins required a life Mr. Watts had given himself.
Emigrant experience - ideas of change
"Pip is an orphan who is given the chance to create his own self and destiny. Pip's experience
reminds us of the emigrant's experience. Each is free to create himself anew. Each is also free
to make mistakes..." (Mr. Watts talking)
Effect of white culture on Bougainville:
"there were white people crawling over Panguna like ants over a corpse"
Matilda and Dolores:
"What would you do, girl? If a man was hiding in the jungle and he ask you to steal from me.
Would you do that?"
"She had kept silent when she could have saved the possessions of the village. But now I saw her
problem , because if was also my problem. ..To do so would be to betray my mum. she was stuck
and now I was stuck too. I had no choice.."
"Now I knew some of the moral confusion my mum had experienced....I said nothing and did
nothing.
Here is how a coward thinks. If I stay inside my house I won't have to witness the ransacking of
the Wattses house. I won't have to know."
The end
"Pip is my story, and in the next day I would try where Pip had failed. I would try to return
home."
The will to survive
'..it was the thought of my father's pain that drove me back to the surface..Now I felt a
responsibility to live."
"I was one of those heart-seeds us kids had heard about in class."
Faith/Religion:
Now listen . Faith is like oxygen. It keeps you afloat at all times. Sometimes you need it.
Sometimes you don't. But when you do need it you better be practiced at having faith,
otherwise it won't work.... (Dolores)