She asked where he lived. Second to the right,' said Peter, 'and then straight on till morning.

This line comes from J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan story, in which Peter gives directions to Neverland—an imaginary place reached not by ordinary geography but by a childlike mode of travel and belief. Barrie first introduced Peter Pan on stage in 1904 and then expanded the material in prose, most famously in the novel Peter and Wendy (1911). The “second to the right, and then straight on till morning” direction is spoken as part of the narrative’s playful, mock-practical treatment of fantasy: characters ask sensible questions (where someone lives), and Peter answers with a navigator’s certainty that is simultaneously impossible and enchanting.

The quote encapsulates Barrie’s central conceit: Neverland is both vividly locatable and fundamentally unreachable by adult logic. Peter’s directions mimic real-world navigation (“second to the right”) but then dissolve into the poetic impossibility of going “straight on till morning,” suggesting a journey measured by imagination rather than miles. The line also hints at the story’s bittersweet tension between childhood and adulthood: children accept such directions as meaningful, while adults hear their absurdity. In that way, the phrase becomes a compact emblem of the book’s larger themes—escapism, the elasticity of time, and the fragile, transient certainty of childhood belief.

“Second to the right and straight on till morning.”