Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
53 quotes
"Doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my heart. Some of them. Not all."
". . . I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway."
"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."
"This book is the book you have just read. It’s done."
"Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody."
"A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change."
"She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did."
"The dread had not left my soul."
"I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all."
"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..."
"She was the storm, she was the lightning..."
"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."
"I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger."
"In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day."
"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."
"I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies..."
"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."
"I thought about adults. I wondered 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."
"I wanted to shout down to him, to warn him that he was giving flowers to a monster, but I did not."
"Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don't. I don't."
"...but fear of death gives us strength."
"You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it."
"They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with."
"Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not."
"I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything."