They may brag about the nights they won, the money they took from the casino, but they treasure, secretly treasure, the times they lost. It’s a sacrifice, of sorts.
The lessons continued: for two days she taught him nothing but ways to call for help in every language in the world...
We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearl-like, from our souls without real pain.
I don’t understand parents. Honestly, I don’t think anybody ever does.
I liked real animals. But I liked the animals who existed in a more shadowy way even more than I liked the ones who hopped or slithered or wandered into my real life, because they were impossible, because they might or might not exist, because simply thinking about them made the world a more magical place.
Jessica had, however, convinced herself that Richard’s troll collection was a mark of endearing eccentricity, comparable to Mr. Stockton’s collection of angels.
How do you take your coffee?” “Dark as night, sweet as sin.
I am going to buy groceries. You see, I am the only one of us who brings in any money. The other two cannot make money fortune-telling. This is because they only tell the truth, and the truth is not what people want to hear. It is a bad thing, and it troubles people, so they do not come back. But I can lie to them, tell them what they want to hear. I tell the pretty fortunes. So I bring home the bread. Do you think you will be here for supper?
I was surprised and delighted to find a lot of letters from people in the early days would say, ‘I was terribly depressed and upset until I sat down and read your book. It’s really shown me the way up again.’ I wrote it to do this for myself, and it’s seemed to have the same effect on a lot of other people. I can’t explain it. Perhaps I’ve inadvertently written a self-help book.
This land was brought up from the depths of the ocean by a diver,” said the fire. “It was spun from its own substance by a spider. It was shat by a raven. It is the body of a fallen father, whose bones are mountains, whose eyes are lakes.
I make things up and write them down.
I’m an explorer, -thought Coraline to herself.- And I need all the ways out of here that I can get. So I shall keep walking.
And the girl pulled whatever she could find deep inside her soul, from all the pain, and the hurt, and the fear.
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.
Life is a rock,” suggested Spider, “but the radio rolled me.
Most of the stories in this volume have that much in common: The place they arrived at in the end was not the place I was expecting them to go when I set out. Sometimes the only way I would know that a story had finished was when there weren’t any more words to be written down.
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.
No problem,” I said with all the confidence of a lemming who thinks he’s headed for a nice day at the seashore.
I’m convinced if I keep going one day I will write something decent. On very bad days I will observe that I must have written good things in the past, which means that I’ve lost it. But normally I just assume that I don’t have it. The gulf between the thing I set out to make in my head and the sad, lumpy thing that emerges into reality is huge and distant and I just wish that I could get them closer.
She looked at the spear in a way that no woman had ever looked at Richard.