The Ocean at the End of the Lane Quotes

“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.”

“A small part of my mind remembered an alternate pattern of events and then lost it, as if I had woken from a comfortable sleep and looked around, pulled the bedclothes over me, and returned to my dream.”

“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.”

“That’s the trouble with living things. Don’t last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.”

“Lettie Hempstock’s ocean. I remembered that, and remembering that, I remembered everything.”

“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.”

“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”

“Growing up, I took so many cues from books . . . They were my teachers and my advisors.”

“Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside.”

“Nothing I had ever drunk had ever tasted like that before: rich and warm and perfectly happy in my mouth. I remembered that milk after I had forgotten about everything else.”

“I want to remember . . . Because it happened to me. And I’m still me.”

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

“The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”

“Adults follow paths. Children explore.”

“Gran always likes the full moon to shine on this side of the house. She says it’s restful, and it reminds her of when she was a girl . . . And it means you don’t trip on the stairs.”

“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.”

“I became terrified of him when he was angry. His face . . . would grow red, and he would shout, shout so loudly and furiously that it would, literally, paralyze me. I would not be able to think.”

“I knew enough about adults to know that if I did tell them what had happened, I would not be believed.”

“Oh, monsters are scared . . . That’s why they’re monsters.”

“I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.”

“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled.”