I didn’t know what to call it, what was happening between us, but I liked it. It felt silly and fragile and good.
Catalog
Book
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Read the #1 New York Times best-selling series before it continues in A Map of Days. Includes an excerpt from Hollow City and an interview with author Ransom Riggs A mysterious island.
Characters
I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.
I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.
When someone won’t let you in, eventually you stop knocking. Know what I mean?
They worried that I spent too much time alone, clinging to the notion that socializing was therapeutic. So was electroshock, I reminded them.
I realized that leaving wouldn't be like I had imagined, like casting off a weight. Their memory was something tangible and heavy, and I would carry it with me.
I knew there was something peculiar about you," she said. "And I mean that as the highest compliment.
If you must fail," he said grandly, "fail spectacularly!
If I never went home, what exactly would I be missing? I pictured my cold cavernous house, my friendless town full of bad memories, the utterly unremarkable life that had been mapped out for me. It had never once occurred to me, I realized, to refuse it.
I didn’t know what to call it, what was happening between us, but I liked it. It felt silly and fragile and good.
She moved to pinch me again but I blocked her hand. I'm no expert on girls, but when one tries to pinch you four times, I'm pretty sure that's flirting.
But these weren't the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around--they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late.
To have endured horrors, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that honorable and brave— that was magical.
What an unchallenging life it would be if we always got things right on the first go.
I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.
I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was. Likewise, I never imagined that home might be something I would miss.
Sometimes it's better not to look back.
So one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn't become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.
Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize we were alone? I had always known…
We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing in them becomes too high.