Jibby Jones quotes

Jibby Jones looked at us thoughtfully.

“I think you’re teasing me,” he said. “A great many people tease me. It is because I look stupid. But I am not as stupid as I look.”

“Who told you that?” he asked Jibby Jones.

After that we let him be one of us. We couldn’t be really mean to a fellow like that; he was too good-natured and willing, and too much fun, too.

He was the queerest boy we ever knew.

One day he came out in an old suit that was so small for him that the pants came halfway to his knees and his sleeves came only about halfway to his wrists. He did look funny! But we did not say anything;

It had been the “big suit” once, and that was the name of it, so it was always the “big suit.” We thought he was stupid. But he wasn’t. Not when you came to find out.

He looked at things a different way from the rest of us, that was all.

“Well, what good does it do?” asked Skippy.

“Everything you know does some good,” said Jibby. “That’s what knowing things is for, to do us good. It is just the ‘little bit more’ that makes anything the ‘most’ instead of leaving it the ‘least.’ ”

“I guess that’s so,” I said. “It’s partly because Wampus knows a little bit more about fishing than we do that he wins the Uncle Oscar Fishing Prize every year.”

“Sure, I did!” said Jibby.

“I’ve got a nose that can smell common sense that far.”

Well, that beat us! That beat Wampus, too.

“I don’t see that you’ve got any kick to make about shotguns,” the Rat said, in his whining voice.

“I’m the one that got shot at.”

“I don’t care who got shot at,” the Tough Customer said. “Four or five barrels of cider wouldn’t pay me for getting my hide full of birdshot, not if it was the hardest cider on earth.

Edwin Skreever’s vest and the other sort of tangled in his watch-chain. Then Mr. Edwin Skreever would whack at him and say: “Get down you beast!” But not when May was handy.

Rover was my dog, because May had given him to me, but he was May’s dog, too, because Mr. Jack Betts had given him to May.

I never knew when Rover was my dog and when he was May’s dog, because girls are mostly Indian givers.

Jack Betts had run the Skittery I and the Skittery II onto snags and mashed them to splinters. I guess that was one reason why May did not want to marry Mr. Jack Betts—she was afraid he would mash himself to splinters some day.

A husband that is mashed to splinters is not much use around the house.

Mr. Edwin Skreever used to say:

He said it was a headstrong nose and if it made up its mind to be red it was bound to be red, and no use fooling with it.

“If I had two of ’em,” he said, “and the other was a green one, I’d look like a steamboat.”

He showed where he would have his two noses, if he had two, one on either cheek.

Those Romer bullies would row across the river but when they got just so far they would come to the end of the trotline, where it was tied to the big anchor stone, and there the skiff would stop. I chuckled.

“Scratch a bully and you find a coward,” Jibby said.

“My Grandfather Parmenter used to say that, and he was a wise man. He had a nose like mine. Scratch a bully and find a coward.”

“And I had the skiff. …”

“Well, what else could anybody do with a couple of screw eyes and a trotline and a skiff?” Jibby asked.

“I couldn’t think of anything else to do with them, so I did that. But I’m sorry for one thing.

The first specimen he let us see was a grain of sand from the seashore of the Atlantic Ocean, United States. Without the magnifying-glass you could not see it at all, but when we looked through the glass at it we all said, “Oh, boy!”

It was like a drop of moonlight shut up in a clear stone. It did not sparkle; it glowed.

Then he showed us one from the Pacific Ocean that was like yellow sunlight.

We pounded on the walls and rummaged in every room, hunting for secret hiding-places, and everything had a different look to us.

Nothing changes a place like thinking there is treasure hidden in it.

We were all as busy as bees.

It looked foolish, but maybe it was the wisest way, after all. I guess it is.

I guess the wisest thing is to make up your mind what you want, and then go for it, and keep on going for it until you get it.

I sort of imagined that Tough Customer was not going to let an 1804 dollar drop down a sewer. It looked too smart, to have him standing right over that grating. So that’s all there is to it—experience and imagination.”

And that’s so. They do make a mighty good team. When you have Experience and Imagination hitched up together, you can do almost anything.

I was thinking that when Orlando, in the bag, gave a yowl.

Along in May you can’t pick up a bumblebee and kiss it, because affection of that sort is one thing a bumblebee does not understand much about, but a May bumblebee is a gentle violet alongside of a September bumblebee.

By September a bumblebee is as grouchy as a snake with a sore tail, and is just aching to stick his stinger into somebody.

I suppose a bumblebee spends the whole summer sharpening its stinger and getting ready for battle, and by September it wants war. And this was the meanest day of September for hostile bumblebees.

“And that is so easy! Only ten of them!” I said.

“Well, I am surprised at you, George,” Jibby drawled. “You talk as if they were ten bumblebees.”

“But how are we going to get rid of them?” Wampus asked.