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Luisa Rey
Timothy Cavendish is the protagonist of “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish,” a film that Sonmi~451 watches. He is in his 60s and runs a vanity publishing company that experiences a freak success after one of his authors, Dermot Hoggins, throws the critic Felix Finch off a roof and becomes a famous murderer. But Timothy soon becomes a victim of his own success when Dermot’s violent brothers demand more money on behalf of Dermot. In an attempt to escape the situation, Timothy makes the mistake of trusting his own brother, Denholme, and he ends up imprisoned in a nursing home called Aurora House. Stuck in Aurora House, Timothy struggles to convince the nurses he’s not senile and realizes that he’ll have to break out on its own. He hatches a plan with fellow nursing home residents Ernie Blacksmith and Veronica Costello, ultimately escaping Aurora House and reclaiming his old life. Timothy’s ordeal highlights how society neglects the sick and the elderly. His brute-force escape from the nursing home shows how it’s not always possible to navigate a bureaucracy, so sometimes the only option is to take direct action. He also symbolizes the necessity of facing own’s own mortality and the potential benefits of doing so, as his encounter with old age at the nursing home helps motivate him to return to his old life with renewed vigor.
Timothy Cavendish Quotes in Cloud Atlas
The Cloud Atlas quotes below are all either spoken by Timothy Cavendish or refer to Timothy Cavendish. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 2
Quotes
She plays with that birthmark in the hollow of my shoulder, the one you said resembles a comet—can’t abide the woman dabbling with my skin.
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Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4
Quotes
I will not deny a nascent sense of a silver lining to this tragic turn. My Haymarket office suite housed ninety-five unsold shrink-wraps of Dermot Hoggins’s Knuckle Sandwich, impassioned memoir of Britain’s soon to be most famous murderer. Frank Sprat—my stalwart printer in Sevenoaks, to whom I owed so much money I had the poor man over a barrel—still had the plates and was ready to roll at a moment’s notice.
Hardcovers, ladies and gentlemen.
Fourteen pounds ninety-nine pence a shot.
A taste of honey!
Ominous, no? I had seen One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest with an extraordinarily talentless but wealthy and widowed poetess whose collected works, Verses Wild & Wayward, I was annotating but who was less widowed than initially claimed, alas. “Look, I’m sure you’re a reasonable woman.” The oxymoron passed without comment. “So read my lips. I am not supposed to be here. I checked into Aurora House believing it to be a hotel.”
Chapter 8
Quotes
“I wouldn’t have locked up Noakes and stolen a car if I’d known you couldn’t pick the lock!”
“Aye, exactly, you’re nesh, so you needed encouragement.”
That is more or less it. Middle age is flown, but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.
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Timothy Cavendish Quotes in Cloud Atlas
The Cloud Atlas quotes below are all either spoken by Timothy Cavendish or refer to Timothy Cavendish. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 2
Quotes
She plays with that birthmark in the hollow of my shoulder, the one you said resembles a comet—can’t abide the woman dabbling with my skin.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4
Quotes
I will not deny a nascent sense of a silver lining to this tragic turn. My Haymarket office suite housed ninety-five unsold shrink-wraps of Dermot Hoggins’s Knuckle Sandwich, impassioned memoir of Britain’s soon to be most famous murderer. Frank Sprat—my stalwart printer in Sevenoaks, to whom I owed so much money I had the poor man over a barrel—still had the plates and was ready to roll at a moment’s notice.
Hardcovers, ladies and gentlemen.
Fourteen pounds ninety-nine pence a shot.
A taste of honey!
Ominous, no? I had seen One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest with an extraordinarily talentless but wealthy and widowed poetess whose collected works, Verses Wild & Wayward, I was annotating but who was less widowed than initially claimed, alas. “Look, I’m sure you’re a reasonable woman.” The oxymoron passed without comment. “So read my lips. I am not supposed to be here. I checked into Aurora House believing it to be a hotel.”
Chapter 8
Quotes
“I wouldn’t have locked up Noakes and stolen a car if I’d known you couldn’t pick the lock!”
“Aye, exactly, you’re nesh, so you needed encouragement.”
That is more or less it. Middle age is flown, but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.
