Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

by

Ransom Riggs

Miss Alma Peregrine Character Analysis

Miss Peregrine is the caretaker of the home on Cairnholm. She is an ymbryne, meaning that she can manipulate time and transform into a bird. Miss Peregrine is fiercely protective of the children, but sometimes this leads to trouble. The children often feel restricted by having to remain inside the time loop on the island, and some (like Victor) feel so constricted that they put themselves in danger by trying to leave the loop. Miss Peregrine also hides information from Jacob; she worries that telling him that he is peculiar will be too much for him to handle, even though withholding this information ends up putting him in greater danger. Towards the end of the book, Dr. Golan kidnaps Miss Peregrine, and Jacob, Emma, and the other children prove their bravery and responsibility by rescuing her. As of the end of the book, she is unable to return to her human form, leaving the children to search for other ymbrynes to help them fix their time loop.

Miss Alma Peregrine Quotes in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

The Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children quotes below are all either spoken by Miss Alma Peregrine or refer to Miss Alma Peregrine. 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:
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
).
Chapter 3 Quotes

For the first time in months, I fell into a deep, nightmare-free slumber. I dreamed instead about my grandfather as a boy, about his first night here, a stranger in a strange land, under a strange roof, owing his life to people who spoke a strange tongue. When I awoke, sun streaming through my window, I realized it wasn’t just my grandfather’s life that Miss Peregrine had saved, but mine, too, and my father’s. Today, with any luck, I would finally get to thank her.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Miss Alma Peregrine, Jacob’s Dad
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 76
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

“But the larger world turned against us long ago. The Muslims drove us out. The Christians burned us as witches. Even the pagans of Wales and Ireland eventually decided that we were all malevolent faeries and shape-shifting ghosts.”

“So why didn’t you just—I don’t know—make your own country somewhere? Go and live by yourselves?”

“If only it had been that simple,” she said. “Peculiar traits often skip a generation, or ten. Peculiar children are not always, or even usually, born to peculiar parents, and peculiar parents do not always, or even usually bear peculiar children. Can you imagine, in a world so afraid of otherness, why this would be a danger to all peculiar-kind?”

“Because normal parents would be freaked out if their kids started to, like, throw fire?”

“Exactly, Mr. Portman. The peculiar offspring of common parents are often abused and neglected in the most horrific ways.”

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Miss Alma Peregrine (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 154
Explanation and Analysis:

Falling asleep, my thoughts drifted to the peculiar children and the first question they’d asked after Miss Peregrine had introduced me: Is Jacob going to stay with us? At the time I’d thought, Of course not. But why not? If I never went home, what exactly would I be missing? I pictured my cold cavernous house, my friendless town full of bad memories, the utterly unremarkable life that had been mapped out for me. It had never once occurred to me, I realized, to refuse it.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Miss Alma Peregrine
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 181
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Yes, it was beautiful and life was good, but if every day were exactly alike and if the kids really couldn’t leave, as Miss Peregrine had said, then this place wasn’t just a heaven but a kind of prison, too. It was just so hypnotizingly pleasant that it might take a person years to notice, and by then it would be too late; leaving would be too dangerous.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Miss Alma Peregrine, Victor
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 213
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

I was moved by this new idea of my grandfather, not as a paranoiac gun nut or a secretive philanderer or a man who wasn’t there for his family, but as a wandering knight who risked his life for others, living out of cars and cheap motels, stalking lethal shadows, coming home shy a few bullets and marked with bruises he could never quite explain and nightmares he couldn’t talk about. For his many sacrifices, he received only scorn and suspicion from those he loved.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Miss Alma Peregrine, Jacob’s Dad
Page Number: 255
Explanation and Analysis:

Some years ago, around the turn of the last century, a splinter faction emerged among our people—a coterie of disaffected peculiars with dangerous ideas. They believed they had discovered a method by which the function of time loops could be perverted to confer upon the user a kind of immortality; not merely the suspension of aging, but the reversal of it. They spoke of eternal youth enjoyed outside the confines of loops, of jumping back and forth from future to past with impunity, suffering none of the ill effects that have always prevented such recklessness—in other words, of mastering time without being mastered by death.

Related Characters: Miss Alma Peregrine (speaker), Jacob Portman
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 258-259
Explanation and Analysis:

Others might call the state of being they subsequently assumed a kind of living damnation. Weeks later there began a series of attacks upon peculiars by awful creatures who, apart from their shadows, could not be seen except by peculiars like yourself—our very first clashes with the hollowgast. It was some time before we realized that these tentacle-mawed abominations were in fact our wayward brothers, crawled from the smoking crater left behind by their experiment. Rather than becoming gods, they had transformed themselves into devils.

Related Characters: Miss Alma Peregrine (speaker), Jacob Portman, Dr. Golan/The Birder, Enoch
Page Number: 259-260
Explanation and Analysis:

I wanted to explain everything, and for him to tell me he understood and offer some tidbit of parental advice. I wanted, in that moment, for everything to go back to the way it had been before we came here; before I ever found that letter from Miss Peregrine, back when I was just a sort-of-normal messed-up rich kid in the suburbs. Instead, I sat next to my dad for awhile and talked about nothing, and I tried to remember what my life had been like in that unfathomably distant era that was four weeks ago, or imagine what it might be like four weeks from now—but I couldn’t. Eventually we ran out of nothing to talk about, and I excused myself and went upstairs to be alone.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Miss Alma Peregrine, Jacob’s Dad
Page Number: 268
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

Emma stood up and shut the door. “She won’t kill us,” she said, “those things will. And if they don’t, living like this might just be worse than dying. The Bird’s got us cooped up so tight we can hardly breathe, and all because she doesn’t have the spleen to face whatever’s out there!”

Related Characters: Emma Bloom/The Girl (speaker), Jacob Portman, Miss Alma Peregrine, Miss Avocet
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 282
Explanation and Analysis:

“Is this what you want?” Golan shouted. “Go ahead, burn me! The birds will burn, too! Shoot me and I’ll throw them over the side!”

“Not if I shoot you in the head!”

He laughed. “You couldn’t fire a gun if you wanted to. You forget, I’m intimately familiar with your poor, fragile psyche. It’d give you nightmares.”

I tried to imagine it: curling my finger around the trigger and squeezing; the recoil and the awful report. What was so hard about that? Why did my hand shake just thinking about it? How many wights had my grandfather killed? Dozens? Hundreds? If he were here instead of me, Golan would be dead already, laid out while he’d been squatting against the rail in a daze. It was an opportunity I’d already wasted; a split-second of gutless indecision that might’ve cost the ymbrynes their lives.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Dr. Golan/The Birder (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Emma Bloom/The Girl, Miss Alma Peregrine, Miss Avocet
Page Number: 324
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

We were quiet but excited. The children hadn’t slept, but you wouldn’t have known it to look at them. It was September fourth, and for the first time in a very long time, the days were moving again. Some of them claimed they could feel the difference; the air in their lungs was fuller, the race of blood through their veins faster. They felt more vital, more real.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Miss Alma Peregrine
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 351
Explanation and Analysis:

In the next boat, I saw Bronwyn wave and raise Miss Peregrine’s camera to her eye. I smiled back. We’d brought none of the old photo albums with us; maybe this would be the first picture in a brand new one. It was strange to think that one day I might have my own stack of yellowed photos to show skeptical grandchildren—and my own fantastic stories to share.

Then Bronwyn lowered the camera and raised her arm, pointing at something beyond us. In the distance, black against the rising sun, a silent procession of battleships punctuated the horizon.

We rowed faster.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Miss Alma Peregrine, Bronwyn, Miss Avocet
Related Symbols: Pictures, The Home
Page Number: 352
Explanation and Analysis:
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Miss Alma Peregrine Quotes in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

The Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children quotes below are all either spoken by Miss Alma Peregrine or refer to Miss Alma Peregrine. 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:
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
).
Chapter 3 Quotes

For the first time in months, I fell into a deep, nightmare-free slumber. I dreamed instead about my grandfather as a boy, about his first night here, a stranger in a strange land, under a strange roof, owing his life to people who spoke a strange tongue. When I awoke, sun streaming through my window, I realized it wasn’t just my grandfather’s life that Miss Peregrine had saved, but mine, too, and my father’s. Today, with any luck, I would finally get to thank her.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Miss Alma Peregrine, Jacob’s Dad
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 76
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

“But the larger world turned against us long ago. The Muslims drove us out. The Christians burned us as witches. Even the pagans of Wales and Ireland eventually decided that we were all malevolent faeries and shape-shifting ghosts.”

“So why didn’t you just—I don’t know—make your own country somewhere? Go and live by yourselves?”

“If only it had been that simple,” she said. “Peculiar traits often skip a generation, or ten. Peculiar children are not always, or even usually, born to peculiar parents, and peculiar parents do not always, or even usually bear peculiar children. Can you imagine, in a world so afraid of otherness, why this would be a danger to all peculiar-kind?”

“Because normal parents would be freaked out if their kids started to, like, throw fire?”

“Exactly, Mr. Portman. The peculiar offspring of common parents are often abused and neglected in the most horrific ways.”

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Miss Alma Peregrine (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 154
Explanation and Analysis:

Falling asleep, my thoughts drifted to the peculiar children and the first question they’d asked after Miss Peregrine had introduced me: Is Jacob going to stay with us? At the time I’d thought, Of course not. But why not? If I never went home, what exactly would I be missing? I pictured my cold cavernous house, my friendless town full of bad memories, the utterly unremarkable life that had been mapped out for me. It had never once occurred to me, I realized, to refuse it.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Miss Alma Peregrine
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 181
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Yes, it was beautiful and life was good, but if every day were exactly alike and if the kids really couldn’t leave, as Miss Peregrine had said, then this place wasn’t just a heaven but a kind of prison, too. It was just so hypnotizingly pleasant that it might take a person years to notice, and by then it would be too late; leaving would be too dangerous.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Miss Alma Peregrine, Victor
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 213
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

I was moved by this new idea of my grandfather, not as a paranoiac gun nut or a secretive philanderer or a man who wasn’t there for his family, but as a wandering knight who risked his life for others, living out of cars and cheap motels, stalking lethal shadows, coming home shy a few bullets and marked with bruises he could never quite explain and nightmares he couldn’t talk about. For his many sacrifices, he received only scorn and suspicion from those he loved.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Miss Alma Peregrine, Jacob’s Dad
Page Number: 255
Explanation and Analysis:

Some years ago, around the turn of the last century, a splinter faction emerged among our people—a coterie of disaffected peculiars with dangerous ideas. They believed they had discovered a method by which the function of time loops could be perverted to confer upon the user a kind of immortality; not merely the suspension of aging, but the reversal of it. They spoke of eternal youth enjoyed outside the confines of loops, of jumping back and forth from future to past with impunity, suffering none of the ill effects that have always prevented such recklessness—in other words, of mastering time without being mastered by death.

Related Characters: Miss Alma Peregrine (speaker), Jacob Portman
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 258-259
Explanation and Analysis:

Others might call the state of being they subsequently assumed a kind of living damnation. Weeks later there began a series of attacks upon peculiars by awful creatures who, apart from their shadows, could not be seen except by peculiars like yourself—our very first clashes with the hollowgast. It was some time before we realized that these tentacle-mawed abominations were in fact our wayward brothers, crawled from the smoking crater left behind by their experiment. Rather than becoming gods, they had transformed themselves into devils.

Related Characters: Miss Alma Peregrine (speaker), Jacob Portman, Dr. Golan/The Birder, Enoch
Page Number: 259-260
Explanation and Analysis:

I wanted to explain everything, and for him to tell me he understood and offer some tidbit of parental advice. I wanted, in that moment, for everything to go back to the way it had been before we came here; before I ever found that letter from Miss Peregrine, back when I was just a sort-of-normal messed-up rich kid in the suburbs. Instead, I sat next to my dad for awhile and talked about nothing, and I tried to remember what my life had been like in that unfathomably distant era that was four weeks ago, or imagine what it might be like four weeks from now—but I couldn’t. Eventually we ran out of nothing to talk about, and I excused myself and went upstairs to be alone.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Miss Alma Peregrine, Jacob’s Dad
Page Number: 268
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

Emma stood up and shut the door. “She won’t kill us,” she said, “those things will. And if they don’t, living like this might just be worse than dying. The Bird’s got us cooped up so tight we can hardly breathe, and all because she doesn’t have the spleen to face whatever’s out there!”

Related Characters: Emma Bloom/The Girl (speaker), Jacob Portman, Miss Alma Peregrine, Miss Avocet
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 282
Explanation and Analysis:

“Is this what you want?” Golan shouted. “Go ahead, burn me! The birds will burn, too! Shoot me and I’ll throw them over the side!”

“Not if I shoot you in the head!”

He laughed. “You couldn’t fire a gun if you wanted to. You forget, I’m intimately familiar with your poor, fragile psyche. It’d give you nightmares.”

I tried to imagine it: curling my finger around the trigger and squeezing; the recoil and the awful report. What was so hard about that? Why did my hand shake just thinking about it? How many wights had my grandfather killed? Dozens? Hundreds? If he were here instead of me, Golan would be dead already, laid out while he’d been squatting against the rail in a daze. It was an opportunity I’d already wasted; a split-second of gutless indecision that might’ve cost the ymbrynes their lives.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Dr. Golan/The Birder (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Emma Bloom/The Girl, Miss Alma Peregrine, Miss Avocet
Page Number: 324
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

We were quiet but excited. The children hadn’t slept, but you wouldn’t have known it to look at them. It was September fourth, and for the first time in a very long time, the days were moving again. Some of them claimed they could feel the difference; the air in their lungs was fuller, the race of blood through their veins faster. They felt more vital, more real.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Miss Alma Peregrine
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 351
Explanation and Analysis:

In the next boat, I saw Bronwyn wave and raise Miss Peregrine’s camera to her eye. I smiled back. We’d brought none of the old photo albums with us; maybe this would be the first picture in a brand new one. It was strange to think that one day I might have my own stack of yellowed photos to show skeptical grandchildren—and my own fantastic stories to share.

Then Bronwyn lowered the camera and raised her arm, pointing at something beyond us. In the distance, black against the rising sun, a silent procession of battleships punctuated the horizon.

We rowed faster.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Miss Alma Peregrine, Bronwyn, Miss Avocet
Related Symbols: Pictures, The Home
Page Number: 352
Explanation and Analysis: