Little Bee

by

Chris Cleave

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Chapter One Quotes

How I would love to be a British pound. A pound is free to travel to safety, and we are free to watch it go. This is the human triumph. This is called, globalization.

Related Characters: Little Bee (speaker)
Page Number: 2
Explanation and Analysis:

Once a week, I sat on the foam mattress of my bed and I painted my toenails. I found the little bottle of varnish at the bottom of a charity box. It still had the price ticket on it. If I ever discover the person who gave it then I will tell them, for the cost of one British pound and ninety-nine pence, they saved my life. Because this is what I did in that place, to remind myself I was alive underneath everything: under my steel toe caps I wore bright red nail varnish.

Related Characters: Little Bee (speaker)
Page Number: 7
Explanation and Analysis:

I felt that if I took one step forward, the earth itself would rise up and reject me. There was nothing natural about me now. I stood there in my heavy boots with my breasts strapped down, neither a woman nor a girl, a creature who had forgotten her language and learned yours, whose past had crumbled to dust.

Related Characters: Little Bee (speaker)
Page Number: 19
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Two Quotes

That summer—the summer my husband died—we all had identities we were loath to let go of. My son had his Batman costume, I still used my husband’s surname, and Little Bee, though she was relatively safe with us, still clung to the name she had taken in a time of terror. We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refuges from ourselves.

Related Characters: Sarah O’Rourke (speaker), Little Bee, Andrew O’Rourke, Charlie O’Rourke / “Batman”
Related Symbols: Charlie’s Batman Costume
Page Number: 22
Explanation and Analysis:

In place of my finger is a stump, a phantom digit that used to be responsible for the E, D, and C keys on my laptop. I can’t rely on E, D, and C anymore. They go missing when I need them most. Pleased becomes please. Ecstasies becomes stasis.

Related Characters: Sarah O’Rourke (speaker), Little Bee, Andrew O’Rourke
Related Symbols: Sarah’s Missing Finger
Page Number: 22
Explanation and Analysis:

He wouldn’t give up, but if I am strict and force myself now to decide upon the precise moment in this whole story when my heart irreparably broke, it was the moment when I saw the weariness and the doubt creep into my son’s small muscles as his fingers slipped, for the tenth time, from the pale oak lid.

Related Characters: Sarah O’Rourke (speaker), Andrew O’Rourke, Charlie O’Rourke / “Batman”
Related Symbols: Charlie’s Batman Costume
Page Number: 43
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Three Quotes

I stowed away in a great steel boat, but the horror stowed away inside me. When I left my homeland I thought I had escaped—but out on the open sea, I started to have nightmares. I was naïve to suppose I had left my country with nothing.

Related Characters: Little Bee (speaker)
Page Number: 46
Explanation and Analysis:

They told us we must be disciplined to overcome our fears. This is the discipline I learned: whenever I go into a new place, I work out how I would kill myself there. In case the men come suddenly, I make sure I am ready.

Related Characters: Little Bee (speaker), Nkiruka / Kindness
Related Symbols: The Men
Page Number: 47
Explanation and Analysis:

“Yu nivver notice dey interview rooms didn’t have no windows? Me swear to yu, dat man’s ooman mus kept her legs cross for da last ten years, de way he took me up on me offer. An it wasn’t jus on de one day, mind. It took de man four interviews fore he was certain me papers was in order.”

Related Characters: Yevette (speaker), Little Bee
Page Number: 71-72
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Four Quotes

How calm my eyes were, since that day on the beach in Africa. When there has been a loss so fundamental I suppose that to lose just one more thing—a finger, perhaps, or a husband—is of absolutely no consequence at all.

Related Characters: Sarah O’Rourke (speaker), Little Bee, Andrew O’Rourke
Related Symbols: Sarah’s Missing Finger
Page Number: 91
Explanation and Analysis:

So, I realized—life had finally broken through. How silly it looked now, my careful set of defenses against nature: my brazen magazine, my handsome husband, my Maginot line of motherhood and affairs. The world, the real world, had found a way through. It had sat down on my sofa and it would not be denied any longer.

Related Characters: Sarah O’Rourke (speaker), Little Bee, Andrew O’Rourke
Page Number: 95
Explanation and Analysis:

“I just think this is not our affair and so…”

“Ah,” the killer said. “Not your affair.”

He turned to the other hunters and spread his arms.

“Not his affair, him say. Him say, this is black-man business. Ha ha ha ha! […] First time I hear white man say my business not his business. You got our gold. You got our oil. What is wrong with our girls?”

Related Characters: Andrew O’Rourke (speaker), The Leader / The Killer (speaker), Little Bee, Sarah O’Rourke, Nkiruka / Kindness
Page Number: 112
Explanation and Analysis:

I met Andrew O’Rourke when we were both working on a London evening paper. Ours seemed to perfectly express the spirit of the city. Thirty-one pages of celebrity goings-on about town, and one page of news from the world which existed beyond London’s orbital motorway—the paper offered it up as a sort of memento mori.

Related Characters: Sarah O’Rourke (speaker), Andrew O’Rourke
Page Number: 123
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Five Quotes

Then I listened to my sister’s bones being broken one by one. That is how my sister died. […] When the men and the dogs were finished with my sister, the only parts of her that they threw into the sea were the parts that could not be eaten.

Related Characters: Little Bee (speaker), Andrew O’Rourke, Nkiruka / Kindness
Related Symbols: The Men
Page Number: 132
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Six Quotes

I think [Andrew] truly started to believe that Britain was sinking in to the sea. […] Now that Charlie was almost two I suppose I was looking into the future my child would have to inhabit, and realizing that bitching about it might possibly not be the most constructive strategy.

Related Characters: Sarah O’Rourke (speaker), Andrew O’Rourke, Lawrence Osborn
Page Number: 151
Explanation and Analysis:

“I’ve spent two years denying what happened on that beach. Ignoring it, letting it fester. That’s what Andrew did too, and it killed him in the end. I’m not going to let it kill me and Charlie.”

Related Characters: Sarah O’Rourke (speaker), Little Bee, Andrew O’Rourke, Charlie O’Rourke / “Batman”, Lawrence Osborn
Page Number: 172
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Seven Quotes

The gasoline flowing through the pump made a high-pitched sound, as if the screaming of my family was still dissolved in it. The nozzle of the gasoline hose went right inside the fuel tank of Sarah’s car, so that the transfer of the fluid was hidden.

Related Characters: Little Bee (speaker), Sarah O’Rourke
Page Number: 181
Explanation and Analysis:

“Is it really death that you’re running from? I mean, honestly? A lot of the people who come here, they’re after a comfortable life.”

“If they deport me to Nigeria, I will be arrested. If they find out who I am, and what I have seen, then the politicians will find a way to have me killed.”

Related Characters: Little Bee (speaker), Lawrence Osborn (speaker)
Page Number: 187
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Eight Quotes

I closed my eyes and listened to the hum of the fluorescent lights, the buzzing of the fax machines, and the fluid chatter of the editorial girls on their phones to fashion houses. It all seemed suddenly insane, like wearing a little green bikini to an African war.

Related Characters: Sarah O’Rourke (speaker), Little Bee
Page Number: 201
Explanation and Analysis:

“Save [Little Bee] and there’s a whole world of them behind her. A whole swarm of Little Bees, coming here to feed.”

“Or to pollinate.”

Related Characters: Sarah O’Rourke (speaker), Lawrence Osborn (speaker), Little Bee
Page Number: 207
Explanation and Analysis:

“You start off thinking you can kill all the baddies and save the world. Then you get a little bit older, maybe Little Bee’s age, and you realize that some of the world’s badness is inside you, that maybe you’re part of it. And then you get a little bit older still, and a bit more comfortable, and you start wondering if the badness you’ve seen in yourself is really all that bad at all.”

Related Characters: Sarah O’Rourke (speaker), Little Bee, Charlie O’Rourke / “Batman”
Page Number: 209
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Nine Quotes

The boy’s father had dark skin, darker even than my own, and the boy’s mother was a white woman. They were holding hands and smiling at their boy, whose skin was light brown. It was the color of the man and the woman joined in happiness. It was such a good color that tears came into my eyes.

Related Characters: Little Bee (speaker)
Page Number: 218
Explanation and Analysis:

“If I is not in mine costume than I is not Batman.”

“Do you need to be Batman all the time?”

Charlie nodded. “Yes, because if I is not Batman all the time then mine Daddy dies.”

Related Characters: Little Bee (speaker), Charlie O’Rourke / “Batman” (speaker), Andrew O’Rourke
Related Symbols: Charlie’s Batman Costume
Page Number: 223
Explanation and Analysis:

“Inside, you know, I am only a village girl. I would like to be a village girl again and do the things that village girls do. I would like to laugh and smile at the boys. I would like to do foolish things when the moon is full. And most of all, you know, I would like to use my real name.”

Related Characters: Little Bee (speaker), Charlie O’Rourke / “Batman”
Related Symbols: Charlie’s Batman Costume
Page Number: 225
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Eleven Quotes

I smiled and watched Charlie running away with the children , with his head down and his happy arms spinning like propellers, and I cried with joy when the children all began to play together in the sparkling foam of the waves that broke between worlds at the point. It was beautiful […] and that is a word I do not need to explain to you, because now we are all speaking the same language.

Related Characters: Little Bee (speaker), Charlie O’Rourke / “Batman”
Related Symbols: Charlie’s Batman Costume, The Men
Page Number: 266
Explanation and Analysis:
No matches.