The Ocean at the End of the Lane Quotes

“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

“I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book of its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done: swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he had wound up with.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

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

“The dream was haunting me: standing behind me, present and yet invisible, like the back of my head, simultaneously there and not there.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“The dread had not left my soul.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I wondered where the illusion of the second moon had come from, but I only wondered for a moment, and then I dismissed it from my thoughts. Perhaps it was an afterimage, 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

“I don’t think even Gran could take it out of you without hurting your heart. And you need your heart.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“There was nothing to scare me but shadows, and the shadows were not even properly visible when I looked at them directly.”
― 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. 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.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“در خانه پدر همه ی تستهای نیم سوخته را می خورد. می گفت: "به به! زغال! برای آدم خوبه!" یا می گفت: "من عاشق نون سوخته م!" و همه اش را می خورد. وقتی بزرگ تر شدم اعتراف کرد که از نان سوخته خوشش نمی آمده و فقط آن را می خورده تا هدر نرود، و برای لحظه ای تمام دوران کودکی یک دروغ به نظرم آمد: انگار یکی از ستون های باورم که دنیای من بر آن ساخته شده بود در هم فروریخت”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“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

“Ursula Monkton smiled, and the lightnings wreathed and writhed about her. She was power incarnate, standing in the crackling air. She was the storm, she was the lightning, 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

“Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don't. I don't.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I remember my own childhood vividly … I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them.’ Maurice Sendak,”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“...but fear of death gives us strength.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“los niños usan caminos secundarios y senderos ocultos, mientras que los adultos siguen carreteras y caminos principales.”
― Neil Gaiman, El océano al final del camino

“Cada cual recuerda las cosas de una manera; nunca encontrarás a dos personas que recuerden exactamente lo mismo, fueran testigos de ello o no. Dos personas pueden estar muy cerca la una de la otra, y sin embargo tener percepciones muy distintas sobre determinado asunto.”
― Neil Gaiman, El océano al final del camino

“No fui un niño feliz, aunque en ocasiones estaba contento. Vivía en los libros más que en cualquier otra parte.”
― Neil Gaiman, El océano al final del camino

“Erwachsene halten sich auf Wegen. Kinder gehen auf Kundschaft.”
― Neil Gaiman, Der Ozean am Ende der Straße

“Lettie Hempstock’s ocean flowed inside me, and it filled the entire universe, from Egg to Rose. I knew that. I knew what Egg was—where the universe began, to the sound of uncreated voices singing in the void—and I knew where Rose was—the peculiar crinkling of space on space into dimensions that fold like origami and blossom like strange orchids, and which would mark the last good time before the eventual end of everything and the next Big Bang,”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Los adultos siguen caminos. Los niños exploran. A los adultos les gusta recorrer siempre el mismo camino, cientos de veces, o miles; puede que nunca se les ocurra salirse de su ruta, arrastrarse bajo los rododendros, encontrar huecos en las vallas.”
― Neil Gaiman, El océano al final del camino

“mind is a dark fathomless ocean, and every time I sink into it, this world fades, replaced by one far more terrible and beautiful in which I will happily drown.” —New York Times Book Review”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Will she be the same?” The old woman guffawed, as if I had said the funniest thing in the universe. “Nothing’s ever the same,” she said. “Be it a second later or a hundred years. It’s always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“«Perché pensi che abbia paura di qualcosa? È un’adulta, no? Adulti e mostri non hanno paura di niente.» «Oh, i mostri hanno paura sì» disse Lettie. «È per questo che sono mostri. Quanto agli adulti…» Smise di parlare, si grattò il naso lentigginoso con il dito. Poi: «Adesso ti dico una cosa importante. Nemmeno gli adulti, dentro, hanno l’aspetto da adulti. Fuori sono grandi e grossi, sventati e sicuri di sé. Dentro, invece, hanno l’aspetto di sempre, quello che avevano alla tua età. La verità è che gli adulti non esistono. Non ce n’è nemmeno uno in tutto il mondo.»”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all).”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“It was the first day of the spring holidays: three weeks of no school. I woke early, thrilled by the prospect of endless days to fill however I wished. I would read. I would explore.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Despite the raging wrath of our foes the holy souls of your brothers and sisters will remain alive. These evil ones scheme to blot out their names from the face of the earth; but a man cannot destroy letters. For words have wings; they mount up to the heavenly heights and they endure for eternity.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“until I had turned the car around and was on my way back up the lane. I looked back at the farmhouse in my rearview mirror, and a trick of the light made it seem as if two moons hung in the sky above it, like a pair”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“She seemed able to go to sleep whenever she wanted to, a skill I envied and did not have.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane