The Ocean at the End of the Lane

by Neil Gaiman

Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.

As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.

(both of them attending the party as observers, not participants)

Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences.

She seemed able to go to sleep whenever she wanted to, a skill I envied and did not have.

she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.

“I’m going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age.