Quotes from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“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. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from 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 took joy in the things that made me happy.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Books were safer than other people anyway.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“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.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from 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. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie. "That's why they're monsters.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“And did I pass?" The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, "You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

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

“I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“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, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

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

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

“. . . I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories.
I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from 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, quote from 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.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from 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 was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort them.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“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, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

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

“I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was selfish and I was not entirely convinced of the existence of things that were not me, and I was certain, rock-solid, unshakeably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Does it make you feel big to make a little boy cry?”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children stories. They were better than than that. They just were.
Adult stories never made sense, and they were slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, Masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn't adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from 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 raw, and then put them in tins, and make them revolting.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

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“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
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If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastian did next.”
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“[W]e talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannise over them too; we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important, and sounds well. As we are not particular about the meaning of our liveries on state occassions, if they be but fine and numerous enough, so, the meaning or necessity of our words is a secondary consideration, if there be but a great parade of them. And as individuals get into trouble by making too great a show of liveries, or as slaves when they are too numerous rise against their masters, so I think I could mention a nation that has got into many great difficulties, and will get into many greater, from maintaining too large a retinue of words.”
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