Quote 4
"Tip it!" Matilda whispered. "Tip it over!"
She saw the glass wobble. It actually tilted backwards a fraction of an inch, then righted itself again. She kept pushing at it with all those millions of invisible little arms and hands that were reaching out from her eyes, feeling the power that was flashing straight from the two little black dots in the very centres of her eyeballs. (14.28)
Since most of us are unlikely to move things with our own minds in real life (unless there's something Shmoop doesn't know about you), a writer who's describing telekinesis has to go the extra mile to make sure the readers get a feel for exactly what the process is like. We'd say Roald Dahl delivers on that here. Can't you imagine the millions of invisible little arms and hands that are reaching out of Matilda's eyeballs?
Quote 5
"I made the glass tip over."
"I still don't quite understand what you mean," Miss Honey said gently.
"I did it with my eyes," Matilda said. "I was staring at it and wishing it to tip and then my eyes went all hot and funny and some sort of power came out of them and the glass just toppled over." (15.23-5)
What Matilda's just done is so bananas that it doesn't make very much sense to say it aloud. She doesn't have the fancy words to explain moving stuff with her mind neatly or clearly. So her explanation comes out all jumbled, in a sentence that has five "ands" in it. (Go on, count 'em. We'll wait.) Of course, unless you're Roald Dahl, we're betting the supernatural is pretty tough to explain.
Quote 6
"This morning," Matilda said, "just for fun I tried to push something over with my eyes and I couldn't do it. Nothing moved. I didn't even feel the hotness building up behind my eyeballs. The power had gone. I think I've lost it completely." (21.15)
When Matilda tries "just for fun," she's not able to use telekinesis any more. Not even a little bit. It's like she never had the power in the first place. It has vanished into thin air. After this, Miss Honey suggests that Matilda lost the power because it was based on her extra brain juice; she had extra mental energy to burn and it was shooting out like telekinesis. But once she moves up to a challenging class, the extra energy gets used up.
You could also say, though, that when Matilda uses her powers earlier in the book, she's either really mad about unfair treatment or trying to prevent unfairness. And once the Trunchbull has been stopped, a lot of that unfairness goes away. Now she has no justice to dole out, so her powers are unnecessary.