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The Hunger Birds
The opal miner is a South African man who made his fortune mining opals in Australia. He comes to England and rents the narrator’s bedroom; his reason for coming to England is never entirely clear. The narrator finds the opal miner callous—though the man does gift the narrator and his sister raw opals—as the opal miner’s taxi accidentally hits and kills the narrator’s kitten, Fluffy. He immediately replaces Fluffy with a cantankerous tomcat named Monster, who is in no way a replacement for the narrator’s affectionate kitten. Things go from bad to worse when the opal miner steals the family’s car and commits suicide in it after gambling away all his and his friends’ money. It’s implied that the opal miner is connected to the supernatural parallel universe in the novel, as his suicide somehow creates the opportunity for the monster Ursula to enter the mortal world.
The Opal Miner Quotes in The Ocean at the End of the Lane
The The Ocean at the End of the Lane quotes below are all either spoken by The Opal Miner or refer to The Opal Miner. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
I missed Fluffy. I knew you could not simply replace something alive, but I dared not grumble to my parents about it. They would have been baffled at my upset: after all, if my kitten had been killed, it had also been replaced. The damage had been made up.
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Chapter 12
Quotes
“They need to finish this up. It’s what they do: they’re the carrion kind, the vultures of the void. Their job. Clean up the last remnants of the mess. Nice and neat. Pull you from the world and it will be as if you never existed. Just go with it. 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.
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The Opal Miner Quotes in The Ocean at the End of the Lane
The The Ocean at the End of the Lane quotes below are all either spoken by The Opal Miner or refer to The Opal Miner. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
I missed Fluffy. I knew you could not simply replace something alive, but I dared not grumble to my parents about it. They would have been baffled at my upset: after all, if my kitten had been killed, it had also been replaced. The damage had been made up.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12
Quotes
“They need to finish this up. It’s what they do: they’re the carrion kind, the vultures of the void. Their job. Clean up the last remnants of the mess. Nice and neat. Pull you from the world and it will be as if you never existed. Just go with it. 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.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
