A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)

by Ransom Riggs

I had hoped that in returning I might sew together the disparate threads of my life: the normal and the peculiar, the ordinary and the extraordinary.

“Until they have traveled, even the most educated person is ignorant. It’s important the children learn that our society is not the center of the peculiar universe.”

It was a gesture, useless but meaningful. Abe’s friends had not been able to attend his funeral. Somehow, cleaning his house had become their goodbye.

“Even the most terrible era of the past is at least knowable. It can be studied. The world survived it. But in the present, one never knows when the whole world could come to a terrible, crashing end.” I tried to reason with him. “The world’s not going to end today. And even if it does, it’ll happen whether or not you go into this mall with us.” “I know that. But it feels like it will. But perhaps if I just sit here and don’t move, everything will stop moving with me, and nothing bad will happen.”

They came from a time before the concept of teenager-hood even existed. That was an invention of the postwar years, before which you had been either a child or an adult. I wondered how they would be able to impersonate modern teenagers if the very concept was foreign to them.

I think photography is a way to fix ourselves in place. To prove we were here, and we weren’t the monsters they made us out to be.”

War is a germ that can rarely be contained.