White Teeth Quotes

Find the perfect quote to float your boat. Shmoop breaks down key quotations from 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 nostalg...

Appearances Quotes

Irie Jones was obsessed. Occasionally her worried mother cornered her in the hallway before she slunk out of the door, picked at her elaborate corsetry, asked, "What's up with you? What in the Lord...

Identity Quotes

I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST, A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH. I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE...

Race and Ethnicity Quotes

"You said the Iqbals are comin' to dinner. I was just thinkin'... if they're going to want me to cook dem some curry—I mean, I can cook curry—but it's my type of curry." "For God's sake, they'r...

Society and Class Quotes

She just wanted to, well, kind of, merge with them. She wanted their Englishness. Their Chalfenishness. The purity of it. It didn't occur to her that the Chalfens were, after a fashion, immigrants...

Tradition Quotes

"Well, take Alsana's sisters—all their children are nothing but trouble. They won't go to mosque, they don't pray, they speak strangely, they dress strangely, they eat all kinds of rubbish, they...

Religion Quotes

The youth group of the Lambeth Kingdom Hall had been sent doorstepping on a Sunday morning, Separating the sheep from the goats (Matthew 25: 31-46), and Clara, detesting the young Witness men with...

History and the Past Quotes

So there existed fathers who dealt in the present, who didn't drag ancient history around like a ball and chain. So there were men who were not neck-deep and sinking in the quagmire of the past. (1...