Cora W.’s Reviews > The Ocean at the End of the Lane > Status Update

"'You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear.'"

"'You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.'"

"'She's been given to her ocean. One day, in its own time, the ocean will give her back.'"

...

"'Nothing's ever the same,' she said. 'Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and rolling. And people change as much as oceans.'"

"Somebody was humming a tune. I realized, as if from a long way away, that it was me, at the same moment that I remembered what the tune was: 'Girls and Boys Come Out to Play.'

... the moon doth shine as bright as day.
Leave your supper and leave your meat,
and join your playfellows in the street.
Come with a whoop and come with a call.
Come with a whole heart or not at all..."

spotted dick:
- traditional British steamed pudding, historically made with suet and dried fruit and often served with custard

"'And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play.'
'To play what?'
'This,' she said. She waved at the house and the sky and the impossible full moon and the skeins and shawls and clusters of bright stars.
I wish I knew what she meant. It was as if she was talking about a dream we had shared."

"I was no longer cold and I knew everything and I was not hungry and the whole big, complicated world was simple and graspable and easy to unlock. I would stay here for the rest of time in the ocean which was the universe which was the soul which was all that mattered. I would stay here forever.
'You can't,' said Lettie. 'It would destroy you."

"I wondered how I looked to her, in that place, and knew that even in a place that was nothing but knowledge that was the one thing I could not know. That if I looked inward I would see only infinite mirrors, staring into myself for eternity."

"I thought, This is the kind of water you can breath. I thought, Perhaps there is just a secret to breathing water, something simple that everyone could do, if only they knew."

I had to take a break after finishing that chapter. The author has really captured what it's like having an abusive father that you have to stand up to. I shouldn't have read this chapter in public. I need to take a bit of a break from reading it ♡