Meredith’s Reviews > The Ocean at the End of the Lane > Status Update

Gaiman: A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.

Gaiman: I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy.

Gaiman: Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren’t.

Gaiman: When adults fight children, adults always win.

Gaiman: Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisors.

Gaiman: I liked myths. They weren't adult stories, and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.

Gaiman: I was not happy as a child, although from time to time I was content. I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

Gaiman: Books were safer than other people anyway.

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.

"I was going to ask for something, I imagine -- for them ... to tell my sister that it wasn't fair that nothing bad ever happened to her: that her life was charmed and safe and protected, while I was forever stumbling into disaster."