2,710 books
—
13,275 voters
“Although I was an imaginative child, prone to nightmares, I had persuaded my parents to take me to Madame Tussauds waxworks in London, when I was six, because I had wanted to visit the Chamber of Horrors, expecting the movie-monster Chambers of Horrors I'd read about in my comics. I had wanted to thrill to waxworks of Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolf-man. Instead I was walked through a seemingly endless sequence of dioramas of unremarkable, glum-looking men and women who had murdered people - usually lodgers and members of their own families - and who were then murdered in turn: by handing, by the electric chair, in gas chambers. Most of them were depicted with their victims in awkward social situations - seated about a dinner table, perhaps, as their poisoned family members expired. The plaques that explained who they were also told me that the majority of them had murdered their families and sold the bodies to anatomy. It was then that the word anatomy garnered its own edge of horror for me. I did not know what anatomy was. I knew only that anatomy made people kill their children.”
― The Ocean at the End of the Lane
― 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.”
― The Ocean at the End of the Lane
― The Ocean at the End of the Lane
“You wouldn't die in here, nothing ever dies in here, but if you stayed here for too long, after a while just a little of you would exist everywhere, all spread out. And that's not a good thing. Never enough of you all together in one place, so t here wouldn't be anything left that would think of itself as an 'I.' No point of view any longer, because you'd be an infinite sequence of views and of points...”
― The Ocean at the End of the Lane
― The Ocean at the End of the Lane
“Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie. "That's why they're monsters.”
― The Ocean at the End of the Lane
― 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.”
― The Ocean at the End of the Lane
― The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Danielle’s 2025 Year in Books
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