White Teeth Friendship Quotes

Samad had looked at him with great sympathy, for he felt very tenderly for Archie. Their wartime friendship had been severed by thirty years and a separation of continents […] In a fit of nostalgia, and because he was the only man Samad knew on this little island, Samad had sought Archie out, moved into the same London borough. (1.56)

"It is a nice area, we have friends here."

"Who are they?" She slammed her little fist on to the kitchen table, sending the salt and pepper flying, to collide spectacularly with each other in the air. "I don't know them! You fight in an old, forgotten war with some Englishman... married to a black! Whose friends are they? These are the people my child will grow up around? Their children—half blacky-white?" (3.109-110)

Partly because Mrs. Jones becomes pregnant so soon after Mrs. Iqbal and partly because of a daily proximity (by this point Clara is working part-time as a supervisor for a Kilburn youth group that looks like the fifteen-man lineup of a ska and roots band—six-inch Afros, Adidas tracksuits, brown ties, Velcro, sun-tinted shades—and Alsana attends an Asian Women's Prenatal Class in Kilburn High Road round the corner), the two women begin to see more of each other. (4.79)

In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and color, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue. (5.107)

"Give it to me!" He reached over the counter to where Mangal Pande was hanging at a melancholy angle above the stove. "I should never have asked... it would be a dishonor, it would cast into ignominy the memory of Mangal Pande to have him placed here in this— this irreligious house of shame!"

"You what?"

"Give it to me!"

"Now look... wait a minute—" Mickey and Archie reached out to stop him, but Samad, distressed and full of the humiliations of the decade, kept struggling to overcome Mickey's strong blocking presence. They tussled for a bit, but then Samad's body went limp and, covered in a light film of sweat, he surrendered.

"Look, Samad," and here Mickey touched Samad's shoulders with such affection that Samad thought he might weep. "I didn't realize it was such a bloody big deal for you. Let's start again. We'll leave the picture up for a week and see how it goes, right?" (10.53)

"But you're different," Millat Iqbal would say to the martyr Irie Jones, "you're different. We go way back. We've got history. You're a real friend. They don't really mean anything to me." Irie liked to believe that. That they had history, that she was different in a good way. (11.31-32)

The Chalfens had no friends. They interacted mainly with the Chalfen extended family (the good genes that were so often referred to: two scientists, one mathematician, three psychiatrists, and a young cousin working for the Labour Party). Under sufferance and on public holidays, they visited Joyce's long-rejected lineage, the Connor clan, Daily Mail letter-writers who even now could not disguise their distaste for Joyce's Israelite love-match. Bottom line: the Chalfens didn't need other people. (12.8)

John Donne said more than kisses, letters mingle souls and so they do; Irie was alarmed to find such a commingling as this, such a successful merging of two people from ink and paper despite the distance between them. No love letters could have been more ardent. No passion more fully returned, right from the very start. The first few letters were filled with the boundless joy of mutual recognition: tedious for the sneaky mailroom boys of Dhaka, bewildering to Irie, fascinating to the writers themselves:

It is as if I had always known you; if I were a Hindu I would suspect we met in some former life. —Magid.

You think like me. You're precise. I like that. —Marcus (14.3-5)

"Dat is Mr. Topps," said Hortense, hurrying across the kitchen in a dark maroon dress, the eyes and hooks undone, and a hat in her hand with plastic flowers askew. "He has been such a help to me since Darcus died. He soothes away my vexation and calms my mind."

She waved to him and he straightened up and waved back. Irie watched him pick up two plastic bags filled with tomatoes and walk in his strange pigeon-footed manner up the garden toward the back kitchen door.

"An' he de only man who made a solitary ting grow out dere. Such a crop of tomatoes as you never did see! Irie Ambrosia, stop starin' and come an' do up dis dress. Quick before your goggle-eye fall out."

"Does he live here?" whispered Irie in amazement, struggling to join the two sides of Hortense's dress over her substantial flank. "I mean, with you?"

"Not in de sense you meaning," sniffed Hortense. "He is jus' a great help to me in my ol' age. He bin wid me deez six years, God bless 'im and keep 'is soul. Now, pass me dat pin." (15.39-41)

[Irie] got a twinge—as happens with a sensitive tooth, or in a "phantom tooth," when the nerve is exposed—she felt a twinge walking past the garage where she and Millat, aged thirteen, had passed one hundred and fifty pennies over the counter, stolen from an Iqbal jam jar, in a desperate attempt to buy a packet of fags. She felt an ache (like a severe malocclusion, the pressure of one tooth upon another) when she passed the park where they had cycled as children, where they smoked their first joint, where he had kissed her once in the middle of a storm. Irie wished she could give herself over to these past-present fictions: wallow in them, make them sweeter, longer, particularly the kiss. (17.194)