- 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.
- As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.
- Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.
- Books were safer than other people anyway.
- 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.
- "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..."
- Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things.
-
- I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.
- Adult stories never made sense, and they were so 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?
- 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 went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.
- The dream was haunting me: standing behind me, present and yet invisible, like the back of my hear, simultaneously there and not there.
-
- "You Hempstocks aren't people," I said.
- "Are too."
- I shook my head. "I bet you don't actually even look like that," I said. "Not really."
- Lettie shrugged. "Nobody actually 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."
- I said, "Are you a monster? Like Ursula Monkton?"
- Lettie threw a pebble into the pond. "I don't think so," she said. "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."
- I said, "People should be scared of Ursula Monkton."
- "P'raps. What do you think Ursula Monkton is scared of?"
- "Dunno. Why do you think she's scared of anything? She's a grown-up, isn't she? Grown-ups and monsters aren't scared of things."
- "Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie. "That's why they're monsters. And as for grown-ups..." She stopped talking, rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Then, "I'm going to tell you something important. 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. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world." She thought for a moment. Then she smiled. "Except for Granny, or course."
- We sat there, side by side, on the old wooden bench, not saying anything. I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.
- But when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative.
- "I couldn't get you to the ocean," she said. "But there was nothing stopping me bringing the ocean to you."
- I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger. I saw the world from above and below. I saw that there were patterns and gates and paths beyond the real. I saw all these things and understood them and they filled me, just as the waters of the ocean filled me.
- 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 found joy in the things that made me happy.
- 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 unshakably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was.
-
- "She's not dead. You didn't kill her, nor did the hunger birds, although they did their best to get to you through her. She's been given to her ocean. One day, in its own time, the ocean will give her back."
- I thought o corpses and of skeletons with pearls for eyes. I thought of mermaids with tails that flicked when they moved, like my goldfishes' tails had flicked before my goldfish had stopped moving, to lie, belly up, like Lettie, on the top of the water. I said, "Will she be the same?"
- The old woman guffawed, as if I had said the funniest thing in the universe. "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."
- "You can't know everything."
-
- She said, "No," but she said it kindly. "You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it."
- A flash of resentment. 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...if not died, then having given up her life. It wasn't fair.
- A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change. But I was seven when all of these things happened, and I was the same person at the end of it that I was at the beginning, wasn't I? So was everyone else. They must have been. People don't change.
- Words save our lives, sometimes. ( acknowledgements )
sep 19 2013 ∞
sep 23 2013 +
sep 23 2013 +