Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

by

Ransom Riggs

Peculiar Term Analysis

A peculiar is a person with special, magical abilities. Each peculiar has different abilities: for example, Emma can conjure fire in her hands, Olive levitates, and Millard is invisible. Peculiar children aren’t always born to peculiar parents, nor do peculiar parents always have peculiar children. For a long time, peculiars lived among “common folk,” meaning people who aren’t peculiars. Gradually, common people came to view peculiars as evil and often persecuted or killed them. This is why Miss Peregrine founded her home, in order to take in and protect young peculiars. Peculiars are also hunted by creatures called hollowgast, who have an intense desire to eat peculiars. Towards the end of the book, Jacob learns that he and his grandfather are both peculiar: they have the unique ability to see hollowgast.

Peculiar Quotes in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

The Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children quotes below are all either spoken by Peculiar or refer to Peculiar. For each quote, you can also see the other terms 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
).
Prologue Quotes

When I was six I decided that my only chance of having a life half as exciting as Grandpa Portman’s was to become an explorer. He encouraged me by spending afternoons at my side hunched over maps of the world, plotting imaginary expeditions with trails of red pushpins and telling me about the fantastic places I would discover one day. At home I made my ambitions known by parading around with a cardboard tube held to my eye, shouting, “Land ho!” and “Prepare a landing party!” until my parents shooed me outside. I think they worried that my grandfather would infect me with some incurable dreaminess from which I’d never recover—that these fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical ambitions—so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I’d been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Jacob’s Dad, Jacob’s Mom
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 12-13
Explanation and Analysis:

I guess he’d seen it coming—I had to grow out of them eventually—but he dropped the whole thing so quickly it left me feeling like I’d been lied to. I couldn’t understand why he’d made up all that stuff, tricked me into believing that extraordinary things were possible when they weren’t. It wasn’t until a few years later that my dad explained it to me: Grandpa had told him some of the same stories when he was a kid, and they weren’t lies, exactly, but exaggerated versions of the truth—because the story of Grandpa Portman’s childhood wasn’t a fairy tale at all. It was a horror story.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Jacob’s Dad
Page Number: 20-21
Explanation and Analysis:

Like the monsters, the enchanted-island story was also a truth in disguise. Compared to the horrors of mainland Europe, the children’s home that had taken in my grandfather must’ve seemed like a paradise, and so in his stories it had become one: a safe haven of endless summers and guardian angels and magical children, who couldn’t really fly or turn invisible or lift boulders, of course. The peculiarity for which they’d been hunted was simply their Jewishness. They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood. What made them amazing wasn’t that they had miraculous powers; that they had escaped the ghettos and gas chambers was miracle enough.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Jacob’s Dad
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:
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:

Then it was my turn. I was sixteen, I told them. I saw a few kids’ eyes widen. Olive laughed in surprise. It was strange to them that I should be so young, but what was strange to me was how young they seemed. I knew plenty of eighty-year-olds in Florida, and these kids acted nothing like them. It was as if the constance of their lives here, the unvarying days—this perpetual deathless summer—had arrested their emotions as well as their bodies, sealing them in their youth like Peter Pan and his Lost Boys.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Olive
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 170
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:

I considered the idea. The sun, the feasts, the friends… and the sameness, the perfect identical days. You can get sick of anything if you have too much of it, like all the petty luxuries my mother bought and quickly grew bored with.

But Emma. There was Emma. Maybe it wasn’t so strange, what we could have. Maybe I could stay for a while and love her and then go home. But no. By the time I wanted to leave, it would be too late. She was a siren. I had to be strong.

“It’s him you want, not me. I can’t be him for you.”

She looked away, stung. “That isn’t why you should stay. You belong here, Jacob.”

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Emma Bloom/The Girl (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Jacob’s Dad, Jacob’s Mom
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 244
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 11 Quotes

I decided I was done lying. “I’m fine, Dad. I was with my friends. “

It was like I’d pulled the pin on a grenade.

“YOUR FRIENDS ARE IMAGINARY!” he shouted. He came toward me, his face turning red. “I wish your mother and I had never let that crackpot therapist talk us into bringing you out here, because it has been an unmitigated disaster. You just lied to me for the last time! Now get in your room and start packing. We’re on the next ferry!” […]

I wondered for a moment if I would have to run from him. I pictured my dad holding me down, calling for help, loading me onto the ferry with my arms locked in a straightjacket.

“I’m not coming with you,” I said.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Jacob’s Dad (speaker), Emma Bloom/The Girl, Dr. Golan/The Birder, Jacob’s Mom, Millard Nullings, Olive
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 344
Explanation and Analysis:

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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Peculiar Term Timeline in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

The timeline below shows where the term Peculiar appears in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Prologue
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
...home, asking why the monsters wanted to hurt them. Jacob’s grandfather explains that they were “peculiar”—one girl could fly, one boy had bees that lived inside him, and there were two... (full context)
Chapter 6
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
...they know they have an audience. Jacob asks what they are, and Millard says they’re “peculiar,” asking if Jacob is, too. Jacob says he doesn’t think so. (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Miss Peregrine brings Jacob to the library, explaining that there are “peculiar spirits” that sometimes crop up in the human species. They exist all over the world,... (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Family Theme Icon
It’s difficult for peculiars to form communities because peculiar children do not always have peculiar parents, and peculiar parents... (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
...can manipulate time—she is known as an ymbryne. She can create temporal loops in which peculiar people can live forever. They only occupy one day: September 3, 1940. She created this... (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Truth vs. Deception Theme Icon
Ymbrynes scour the world for young peculiars and provide them safe harbor from the world. If they don’t ensure that the loops... (full context)
Chapter 7
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
...boy named Horace gives Jacob clothes to better blend in. Jacob asks what makes Horace peculiar, and Emma explains that he has prophetic nightmares. (full context)
Chapter 8
Family Theme Icon
...a tiny heart from its body. Enoch explains that the heart is from a mouse—his peculiar talent is the ability to take life from one thing and give it to something... (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
...to swim up. Back on the surface, Jacob says that the fish are “beautiful” and “peculiar.” (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Family Theme Icon
...but Emma says that Jacob belongs there. Jacob protests, saying that he and Abe aren’t peculiar; otherwise he would have noticed. Emma says that she’s not supposed to tell him this,... (full context)
Chapter 9
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Truth vs. Deception Theme Icon
...the monster that night. Jacob isn’t crazy—that’s his gift. Emma explains that she and other peculiars can only see the monsters’ shadows, which is why the monsters hunt at night. But... (full context)
Truth vs. Deception Theme Icon
...redirects the conversation, asking when Miss Peregrine was planning to tell him that he was peculiar. She says that she didn’t want to shock him by telling him everything during their... (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Family Theme Icon
Truth vs. Deception Theme Icon
...not a life in hiding. He went to war to protect his people—both Jews and peculiars—and afterward he went to America because it had few “hollowgast” (monsters) at the time. Many... (full context)
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
...Peregrine head to the greenhouse, and she begins her story. Long ago, people thought that peculiars were gods—but they aren’t immortal. The time loops can help delay death but not escape... (full context)
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
Miss Peregrine’s brothers, along with a few traitorous ymbrynes and several hundred peculiars, went to Siberia to make their plan a reality. They caused a massive explosion, but... (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
Wights, Miss Peregrine explains, have no peculiar abilities, but they pass for human, so they can act as spies for the hollows.... (full context)
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
Truth vs. Deception Theme Icon
...who was watching him, and he wonders how the man could have known he was peculiar. Miss Peregrine explains that if the wights knew about his grandfather, they most certainly know... (full context)
Chapter 10
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
...being confined to the house makes them apathetic and unhappy. One night, Jacob experiences Horace’s peculiar talent for the first time—Horace is caught in a waking nightmare, screaming terribly and babbling... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
...has happened in the town. Miss Peregrine is shocked, explaining that if hollows can’t eat peculiars, they’ll start to prey on common people instead, which is likely what happened to Martin. (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Family Theme Icon
...the doorway, accompanied by a disgusting smell. Golan offers a deal: help them find more peculiars and Jacob can live freely and not worry about being tracked down by a hollow.... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Truth vs. Deception Theme Icon
...think that he was crazy, even though he clearly knew all along that Jacob was peculiar. He apologizes for not believing his grandfather and for telling the stories to a stranger.... (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
...might happen if the wights and hollows fail again. Golan goes on, saying that the peculiars shouldn’t have to hide from normal humans: they should rule over others and make them... (full context)
Chapter 11
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
...decide to abandon the house, scavenging a few medical supplies to help Millard and a peculiar atlas to help them find other loops. By jumping from one loop to another, they... (full context)
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
...They venture into the village, where people are so shocked that they hardly notice the peculiar children. It’s September 4th for the first time in a long time, and the kids... (full context)