The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

"That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories fade and blend and smudge together..." .Page 61


I went away in my head, to a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.  Page 80


     I felt safe. It was as if the essence of grandmotherliness had been condensed into that one place, that one time.  Page 127


"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." ...
"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." ....
"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 are 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." ...
I though 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. Page 154-155


     Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths, while adults take roads and official paths. Page 156


Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good when they were freshly-picked and raw, and put them in tin cans, and make them revolting. Page 157


Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort them. Page 170


 ...It won't hurt."
     I stared at him. Adults only ever said that when it, whatever it happened to be, was going to hurt so much. Page 183


"But you stayed where you were meant to be, and you didn't listen to them. Well done. That's quality, that is." And she sounded proud. In that moment I forgot my hunger and I forgot my fear. Page 196
 
     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. Page 206


     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.
     Even so, I understood what I was seeing. the hunger birds would-no, they were-ripping the world away, tearing it into nothing. Soon enough, there would be no world. My mother, my father, my sister, my house, my school friends, my town, my grandparents, London, the Natural History Museum, France, television, books ancient Egypt-because of me, all these things would be gone, and there would be nothing in their place.
     ....
     I did not want to die at all. Understand that.
     But I could not let everything be destroyed, when I had it in my power to stop the destruction. Page 216


I knew there was no going back, that there was no way that this could end in anything but pain, and I knew that I was willing to exchange my life for the world. Page 217


"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." Page 227


"You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it."..... 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. Page 231


     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. Page 235


"You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear." Page 241


"Words save our lives, sometimes." Neil Gaiman's Acknowledgments for The Ocean at the End of the Lane








    

River's Bend by JoAnn Ross

...fairy tales demonstrate compassion, intelligence, courage, coping skills and determination. p.221