GCSE English Literature Paper 2 Quotations (short stories + poems)

chemistry - ralph descriptors - predatory, manipulative attitude

‘barked’

‘pouncing on something’

chemistry - ralph imposing on family, progressing relationship between mum & ralph

ralph as an ‘ever more permanent lodger’

chemistry - mum lashing out at grandfather, excluding him

‘you’re ruining our meal - do you want to take yours out to your shed?!’

chemistry - ralph taking over, motif of food/meals

‘the house where ralph now lorded it, tucking into bigger and bigger meals, was a menacing place’

chemistry - narrator’s epiphany, grandfather’s death was mum’s fault

‘suicide can be murder’

MPTT - carla defining herself by her job, role in school/life marked by salary, job as her identity - only seen for economic value

‘part-time catering staff, that’s me, £3.89 per hour’

MPTT - father’s condescending attitude, implying that culture/heritage/language is unimportant

‘what use is polish ever going to be to her?’

MPTT - carla’s insecurity, lack of social mobility, importance of her job - defined by it, feels separate to steve

‘me, carla carter, part-time catering assistant, writing to him about poetry’

MPTT - carla’s response to polish, affect on her

‘it went through me like a knife through butter … I felt my lips move. There were words in my mouth’

family supper - negative description of father

‘a formidable-looking man with a large stony jaw and furious black eyebrows’

family supper - father’s traditional gender roles, dislike of doing domestic jobs

about cooking: ‘hardly a skill I’m proud of … kikuko, come here and help’

family supper - dad patronising + downplaying kikuko’s maturity, traditional gender roles

‘she’s a good girl’

invisible mass - classroom setting, shared fear

‘the stench of fear is in everyone’s nostrils’

invisible mass - hortense forgotten about in the back row

‘hidden, disposed of, dispatched to the invisibility of the back row’

invisible mass - classroom prison metaphor/imagery

‘the walls have been breached. the jailers are quick to realise that this battle is lost’

invisible mass - parents - separation, distance, unfamiliarity

‘these newly acquired people’

invisible mass - disbelief & strong feelings when learning about black history

‘we move back and forth between anger, total disbelief and downright outrage’

invisible mass - closeness to historical characters they learn about

‘they all come from our own back yard’

invisible mass - critique of eurocentric education

‘frozen information’

invisible mass - victorious ending, overcoming obstacles but not forgetting heritage

‘voices are raised, claiming, proclaiming, learning the new language in dis here england’

ozymandias - statue fallen into dissaray

‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone’

ozymandias - head of statue sinking into insignificance

‘half sunk, a shattered visage lies’

ozymandias - unpleasant description of ozymandias - facial expression

‘sneer of cold command’

ozymandias - bold confident statement, irony

‘my name is ozymandias, king of kings, look on my works, ye mighty, and dispair!’

london - control of rich over poor, powerlessness of people

‘i wander through each chartered street / near where the chartered thames does flow’

london - authority restricting human behaviour, mental imprisionment

‘in every voice: in every ban / the mind-forged manacles I hear’

london - pity for victims of conflict/power struggles, criticism of authority

‘the hapless soldier’s sigh / runs in blood down palace walls’

london - destruction & loss of innocence, social corruption

‘the youthful harlot’s curse blasts the new-born infant’s tear’

COTLB - orders, critique of command/leadership

‘“forward, the light brigade!” / was there man dismay’d? / … some one had blunder’d’

COTLB - powerless but heroism of soldiers

‘theirs not to make reply / theirs not to reason why / theirs but to do and die’

COTLB - soldiers’ duty to listen to orders & die, biblical reference, soldiers have no identity

‘into the valley of death rode the six hundred’

COTLB - battle - violent, noisy, destructive

‘volley’d and thunder’d / storm’d at with shot and shell’

remains - powerlessness, orders

‘we get sent out’

remains - description of killing the looter, visions

‘I swear / I see every round as it rips through his life

remains - trauma, visions

‘he’s here in my head when I close my eyes’

war photographer - violence of war, impact on children, photographer’s trauma

‘fields which don’t explode beneath the feet of running children in a nightmare heat’

war photographer - critique of western attitudes to war, amount of pictures / suffering

‘a hundred agonies in black-and-white from which his editor will pick out five or six for sunday’s supplement’

COMH - impacts of eurocentric education, othering & separation to establishment

‘dem tell me / dem tell me / wha dem want to tell me’

COMH - impacts of eurocentric education - loss of identity

‘blind me to me own identity’

COMH - happy ending, change to poem’s trajectory

‘but now I checking out me own history / I carving out me identity’

chrysanthemums - nature vs humans, industrialisation, traditional ideas of home

‘a large bony vine clutched at the house, as if to claw down the tiled roof’

chrysanthemums: elizabeth’s bitterness, gender roles, powerlessness of women

‘”very likely,” she laughed bitterly, “he gives me twenty-three shillings”’

chrysanthemums: elizabeth’s conviction that walter is at the pub

‘You may depend upon it, he’s seated in the Prince o’ Wales’

chrysanthemums: mr rigley representing the effect of mining on people

‘a wound in which the coal dust remained blue like tattooing’

chrysanthemums: elizabeth’s transactional planning about children

‘they were her business’

chrysanthemums: walter’s death - critique of mining industry & vulnerability of workers

‘shut ‘im in, like a mouse-trap’

darkness out there: opinions of the elderly, dismissal, colloquial lang

‘she’s a dear old thing, all on her own’

darkness out there: description of mrs rutter

‘she seemed composed of circles, a cottage-loaf of a woman … eyes snapped and darted’

darkness out there: reactions to the plane, lack of humanity

‘we cheered, I can tell you’

darkness out there: reactions to the dying soldier, lack of humanity

‘he’s not going to last long, and a good job too, three of them that’ll be’

darkness out there: sandra’s epiphany

‘you could get people all wrong, she realised with alarm’

darkness out there: contrast between idyllic setting vs true darkness

‘flowers sparkle and birds sing but everything is not as it appears, oh no’

prelude: narrator’s arrogance

‘straight I unloosed her chain .. an act of stealth and troubled pleasure’

prelude: appearance of mountain, power of nature

‘a huge peak, black and huge, as if with voluntary power instinct upreared its head’

prelude: effect of ordeal on narrator

‘for many days, my brain worked with a dim and undetermined sense of unknown modes of being’

MLD: duchesses’ childlike wonder + duke’s annoyance

‘she had a heart - how shall I say? - too soon made glad, too easily impressed’

MLD: duke’s annoyance that duchess cares less about his importance

‘as if she ranked my gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name with anybody’s gift’

MLD: duke’s refusal to talk to duchess (sees it as beneath him)

‘who’d stoop to blame this sort of trifling?’

exposure: subversion of expectations of nature as comforting - corruption of nature

‘dawn massing in the east her melancholy army attacks once more’

exposure: nature as more dangerous than the war

‘sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence. less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow’

exposure: memory/hallucination of home

‘slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires, glozed with crusted dark-red jewels’

exposure: effect of war on people

[people] ‘pause over half-known faces. all their eyes are ice’

SOTL: conversational/jokey attitude to nature

‘this wizened earth has never troubled us with hay’

SOTL: people used to conflict

‘the sea is company, exploding comfortably down on the cliffs’

SOTL: violent storm, power of nature

‘spits like a tame cat / turned savage’

SOTL: realisation that the conflict/danger they fear is meaningless/nothing

‘space is a salvo. we are bombarded by the empty air. strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear’

bayonet charge: loss of values in war + mechanisation of humans

‘the patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye sweating like molten iron from the centre of his chest’

bayonet charge: soldier questioning purpose, critique of institutions

‘in what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations was he the hand pointing that second?’

bayonet charge: lack of humanity in the war - can’t have values

‘king, honour, human dignity, etcetera dropped like luxuries in a yelling alarm’

poppies: war destroying domestic sphere/family

(poppy) ‘disrupting a blockade of yellow bias binding around your blazer’

poppies: mother’s grief at son leaving

‘all my words flattened, rolled, turned into felt, / slowly melting’

poppies: son’s perspective of possibility/excitement

‘the world overflowing like a treasure chest. a split second and you were away, intoxicated’

tissue: possibility of paper + stronger than other things + light motif

‘paper that lets the light shine through, this is what could alter things’

tissue: importance of paper

‘pages smoothed and stroked and turned / transparent with attention’

tissue: light as more powerful than human structures / arrogance

‘let the daylight break through capitals and monoliths, through the shapes that pride can make’

the emigrée: grief + memory of country (first line)

‘there once was a country… I left it as a child but my memory of it is sunlight-clear’

emigrée: positive memories of country despite war/political troubles

‘it may be sick with tyrants, but I am branded by an impression of sunlight’

emigrée: separation from country

‘time roles its tanks and the frontiers rise between us’

emigrée: language

‘it may now be a lie, banned by the state, but I can’t get it off my tongue. It tastes of sunlight’

kamikaze: pilot leaving

‘embarked at sunrise with … a shaven head full of powerful incantations and enough fuel for a one-way journey into history’

kamikaze: power of nature

‘dark shoals of fishes flashing silver as their bellies swivelled towards the sun’

kamikaze: children’s perspectives of father’s exile

‘only we children still chattered and laughed till gradually we too learned to be silent … that this was no longer the father we loved’

who wrote chemistry

graham swift

who wrote odour of chrysanthemums

d h lawrence

who wrote my polish teacher’s tie

helen dunmore

who wrote korea

john McGahern

who wrote a family supper

kazuo ishiguro

who wrote invisible mass

claudette williams

who wrote the darkness out there

penelope lively

korea - father putting down son at the start - generational difference, class, family relationship

‘sounds a bit highfalutin’ to me … he said aggressively, and I was silent’

korea - dad suggesting going to america, son confused

‘there was something calculating in the face, it made me watchful of him’

korea - context + ironic dependence on england

‘tourists who came every summer … to sit in aluminium deck chairs on the riverbank and fish with rods’

korea - shift in father

‘it was my father’s voice. he was excited.’

korea - son’s reaction to father’s true intentions

‘the splintering of self esteem and the need to crawl into the lavatory and think’

korea - narrator’s epiphany

‘i knew my youth had ended’

korea - father’s anger at son turning down deal

‘when you come to nothing in this fool of a country’

korea - son’s acceptance of fate & hinting that he knows dad’s intentions

‘it’ll be my own funeral’

korea - acceptance of broken relationship between father & son

‘i knew this silence was fixed forever’

family supper - father’s friend representing traditional honour values

‘watanabe killed himself. he didn’t wish to live with the disgrace’

family supper - distance between father & son

‘inevitably, our conversation since my arrival at the airport had been punctuated by long pauses’