The Ocean at the End of the Lane Quotes

“I do to miss my childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in simple things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not away from things, or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good when they were freshly-picked and raw, and put them in tin cans, and make them revolting.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time...”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“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. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world." ... I wonderes if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies...”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“It's too late for sorries, but I appreciate the sentiment.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“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.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that people in the story change.But I was seven when all these things happened, and I was the same person at the end of it that I was at the beginning, wasn't I? So was everyone else. People don't change”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who I was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn´t me, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what was me?”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“A ghost-memory rises, here: a phantom moment, a shaky reflection in the pool of remembrance. I know how it felt when the scavengers took my heart. How it felt as the hunger birds, all mouth, tore into my chest and snatched out my heart, still pumping, and devoured it to get at what was hidden inside it. I know how that feels, as if it was truly a part of my life, of my death. And then the memory snips and rips, neatly, and -”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“But I do not actually remember being a monster. I just remember wanting my own way.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I loved that place as if it was a part of me, and perhaps, in some ways, it was.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“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.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Dinner was wonderful. There was a joint of beef, with roast potatoes, golden-crisp on the outside and soft and white inside, buttered greens I did not recognize, although I think now that they might have been nettles, toasted carrots all blackened and sweet (I did not think that I liked cooked carrots, so I nearly did not eat one but I was brave, and I tried it, and I liked it, and was disappointed in boiled carrots for the rest of my childhood.) For dessert there was the pie, stuffed with apples and with swollen raisins and crushed nuts, all topped with a thick yellow custard, creamier and richer than anything I had ever tasted at school or at home.
The kitten slept on a cushion beside the fire, until the end of the meal, when it joined a fog-colored house cat four times its size in a meal of scraps of meat.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I had been here, hadn’t I, a long time ago? I was sure I had. 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.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“What you remembered? Probably. More or less. Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“من الممل أن يعرف المرء كل شيء.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“My parents had told me that I would not really die, not the real me: that nobody really died, when they died; that my kitten and the opal miner had just taken new bodies and would be back again, soon enough.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Whatever is happening, it can all be sorted out.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“When you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.” A flash of resentment. It’s hard enough being alive, trying to survive in the world and find your place in it, to do the things you need to do to get by, without wondering if the thing you just did, whatever it was, was worth someone having . . . if not died, then having given up her life. It wasn’t fair.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you're going to muck about here.'

'So you used to know everything?'

She wrinkled her nose. 'Everybody did. I told you. It's nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have t give it all up if you want to play.'

'To play what?'

'This,' she said. She waved at the house and the sky and the impossible full moon and the skeins and shawls and clusters of bright stars.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“She's not dead. You didn't kill her, nor did the hunger birds, although they did their best to get to you through her. She's been given her ocean. One day, in its own time, the ocean will give her back.

I thought of corpses and of skeletons with pearls for eyes. I thought of mermaids with tails that flicked when they moved, like my goldfishes' tails had flicked before my goldfish had stopped moving, to lie, belly up, like Lettie, on the top of the water. I said, 'Will she be the same?”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I was their first book.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“The ball of dark fur pressed itself into my chest, and I wished she was my kitten, and knew that she was not.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Perhaps it was an after-image, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane