I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.

The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.

There was a skyness to the sky and a nowness to the world that he had never seen or felt or realized before.

But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?""Easy," said the cat. "Think of somebody walking around the world. You start out walking away from something and end up coming back to it.""Small world," said Coraline."It's big enough for her," said the cat. "Spider's webs only have to be large enough to catch flies.

I think all - or the ones thet I've run into - tend to have a faintly tenuous relationship with the real world, because so much is going on on the inside. They may be geniuses but they often need someone to walk around holding a string. They're sort of balloons, bobbing around.

The world is always ending for someone

He had gone beyond the world of metaphor & simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.