I knew enough about adults to know that if did tell them what had happened, I would not be believed. Adults rarely seemed to believe me when I told the truth anyway.
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.
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.
It doesn’t matter that I can’t remember the details any longer: death happened to her. Death happens to all of us.
But standing in that hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.
Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you’re going to muck about here.
Idris: Are all people like this? The Doctor: Like what? Idris: So much bigger on the inside.
I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.
There’s this thing, they have in french: L’espirit d’escalier. The spirit of the stairway. I don’t think we have a word for it in English. It means, well, the clever things to say that you only think to yourself when you’re on the way out.
It’s only a world, after all, and they’re just sand grains in the desert, worlds.
She smiled at Coraline, as if it had been a very long time since she had smiled and she had almost, but not quite, forgotten how.
Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.
If you have something specific and visible to fear, rather than something that could be anything, it is easier.
They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.
You must never imagine, that just because something is funny, it is not also dangerous.
For some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I’m there for all of them.
She was also an adult, and when adults fight children, adults always win.
I was not happy as a child, although from time to time I was content. I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.
I thought, I’m going to die. And, thinking that, I was determined to live.
She had such unusual eyes. They made me think of the seaside, and so I called her Ocean, and could not have told you why.