Personality
Arnold is depicted as an average nine-year-old boy, his personality enriched with righteous, reliable morals and honesty. His parents were explorers who mysteriously vanished on an expedition during Arnold's infancy, leaving their son presumably orphaned and living in an apartment building with his grandparents and pet pig Abner. Albeit Arnold's admirable kindness normally remains untouched, his less considerate moments include revealing the mortifying secret of a friend and partaking in the savage rebellion being pulled by the fourth-graders against their new, mild-mannered teacher, Mr. Simmons. However, aside from that Arnold is usually intelligent and righteous; he once snuck out with his grandmother late at night to emancipate a sea turtle from an exhibit in a local aquarium and can be relied upon to provide his friends with good advice. Other examples of his generosity include showing kindness to his lonesome, neglected classmate Helga Pataki during their first day of nursery school, resulting in her development of an obsessive an unrequited infatuation with him that is commonly referenced throughout the series, albeit she masks it with surly behavior. Arnold's best friend is Gerald, characterized by his towering black hairstyle, who appears alongside him in virtually every episode and who frequently hangs around with him.
Read more about this topic: Arnold (Hey Arnold!)
Famous quotes containing the word personality:
“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behoves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c’est l’homme, what is likely to happen if l’homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?”
—Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944)
“Talent alone can not make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which by birth and quality is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise; holding things because they are things.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)