Matilda

by Roald Dahl

It is only when the parents begin telling us about the brilliance of their own revolting offspring, that we start shouting, “Bring us a basin! We’re going to be sick!”

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells

Animal Farm by George Orwell

she kept a small box in the outhouse

The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.

Matilda’s parents owned quite a nice house with three bedrooms upstairs, while on the ground floor there was a dining-room and a living-room and a kitchen. Her father was a dealer in second-hand cars and it seemed he did pretty well at it.

But no indoor toilet? When exactly is this?

If only they would read a little Dickens or Kipling they would soon discover there was more to life than cheating people and watching television.

Generous of her to assume they'd be able to follow it

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Onto

Superglue is very powerful stuff, so powerful it will take your skin off if you pull too hard. Mr Wormwood didn’t want to be scalped so he had to keep the hat on his head the whole day long, even when putting sawdust in gear-boxes and fiddling the mileages of cars with his electric drill.

Womp womp.

Mrs Wormwood said to him, “It must be Superglue. It couldn’t be anything else. That’ll teach you to go playing round with nasty stuff like that. I expect you were trying to stick another feather in your hat.”

lmao I like how her mind just automatically went there

“D’you think I’m so stupid I’d glue this thing to my head on purpose?”

Yes.

“Serve him right,” Mrs Wormwood said. “He shouldn’t have put his finger up there in the first place. It’s a nasty habit. If all children had Superglue put on their fingers they’d soon stop doing it.” Matilda said, “Grown-ups do it too, mummy. I saw you doing it yesterday in the kitchen.” “That’s quite enough from you,” Mrs Wormwood said, turning pink.

And later on, as she watched her skinny little husband skulking around the bedroom in his purple-striped pyjamas with a pork-pie hat on his head, she thought how stupid he looked. Hardly the kind of man a wife dreams about, she told herself.

The Ghost

OH YEAH LOL I FORGOT ABOUT THE PARROT

She kept right on reading, and for some reason this infuriated the father. Perhaps his anger was intensified because he saw her getting pleasure from something that was beyond his reach.

There seemed little doubt that the man felt some kind of jealousy. How dare she, he seemed to be saying with each rip of a page, how dare she enjoy reading books when he couldn’t? How dare she?

“It’s burglars!” hissed the mother. “They’re in the dining-room!” “I think they are,” the father said, sitting tight. “Then go and catch them, Harry!” hissed the mother. “Go out and collar them red-handed!” The father didn’t move. He seemed in no hurry to dash off and be a hero. His face had turned grey.

Go on, Harry.

time,

Time.

“I know it’s a ghost!” Matilda said. “I’ve heard it here before! This room is haunted! I thought you knew that.”

The appalling broad orange-and-green check of the jacket and trousers almost blinded the onlooker. He looked like a low-grade bookmaker dressed up for his daughter’s wedding,

Ooh burn

“Good strong hair,” he was fond of saying, “means there’s a good strong brain underneath.” “Like Shakespeare,” Matilda had once said to him. “Like who?” “Shakespeare, daddy.” “Was he brainy?” “Very, daddy.” “He had masses of hair, did he?” “He was bald, daddy.” To which the father had snapped, “If you can’t talk sense then shut up.”

This hair and scalp massage was always accompanied by loud masculine grunts and heavy breathing and gasps of “Ahhh, that’s better! That’s the stuff! Rub it right into the roots!”

God get a room

fv-allsmallcaps

lol what

“I think you will,” the mother said. “Peroxide is a very powerful chemical. It’s what they put down the lavatory to disinfect the pan only they give it another name.” “What are you saying!” the husband cried. “I’m not a lavatory pan! I don’t want to be disinfected!”

for ever?”

Forever

when she marched along a corridor you could actually hear her snorting as she went, and if a group of children happened to be in her path, she ploughed right on through them like a tank, with small people bouncing off her to left and right.

“The thing we all ask about Jenny Is, ‘Surely there cannot be many Young girls in the place With so lovely a face?’ The answer to that is, ‘Not any!’”

Ugh why this is always so cringe

Now most head teachers are chosen because they possess a number of fine qualities. They understand children and they have the children’s best interests at heart. They are sympathetic. They are fair and they are deeply interested in education. Miss Trunchbull possessed none of these qualities and how she ever got her present job was a mystery.

SHE KILLED SOMEBODY

She looked, in short, more like a rather eccentric and bloodthirsty follower of the stag-hounds than the headmistress of a nice school for children.

“A genius!” she shouted. “What piffle is this you are talking, madam? You must be out of your mind! I have her father’s word for it that the child is a gangster!”

This lady needs to chill

She couldn’t believe that the parents were totally unaware of their daughter’s remarkable talents.

They are. :'D

Mr Wormwood was a successful motor-car dealer so she presumed that he was a fairly intelligent man himself.

HA

Wormwood’s

Wormwoods'

“This child has already read an astonishing number of books,” Miss Honey said. “I was simply trying to find out if she came from a family that loved good literature.” “We don’t hold with book-reading,” Mr Wormwood said. “You can’t make a living from sitting on your fanny and reading story-books. We don’t keep them in the house.”

Well that answers that question

“Quite right, sugar-plum,” Mr Wormwood said, casting a look of such simpering sloppiness at his wife it would have made a cat sick.

Barf

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Onto

“If there’s one thing the Trunchbull can’t stand it’s pigtails,” Hortensia said.

There's a lot of things the Trunchbull can't stand

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Onto

Matilda said, “Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable. No parent is going to believe this pigtail story, not in a million years. Mine wouldn’t. They’d call me a liar.”

He knew very well he wasn’t up there to be presented with a prize.

You could be, Brucie! :D

“This clot,” boomed the Headmistress, pointing the riding-crop at him like a rapier, “this blackhead, this foul carbuncle, this poisonous pustule that you see before you is none other than a disgusting criminal, a denizen of the underworld, a member of the Mafia!”

Jeez Aggie

suppurating

Cruel, but good word use.

That cake was made from real butter and real cream!

Yom

And he, that robber-bandit, that safe-cracker, that highwayman standing over there with his socks around his ankles stole it and ate it!”

Okay that socks thing is just personal

When a gentleman has had a particularly good meal, Bogtrotter, he always sends his compliments to the chef. You didn’t know that, did you, Bogtrotter? But those who inhabit the criminal underworld are not noted for their good manners.”

The only thing he knew for certain was that the law forbade the Trunchbull to hit him with the riding-crop that she kept smacking against her thigh.

I feel like throwing little girls by their pigtails is also forbidden by law so let's not get our hopes up Bruce

The cook stood there like a shrivelled bootlace,

It might even be arsenic and he would be dead in ten seconds flat.

Speaking of illegal

faster

Faster,