Alice Sebold
I was like I was in science class: I was curious.Collection: Class
Like snowflakes,' Franny said,'none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one beforeCollection: Snowflake
People grow up by living.Collection: Growing Up
You're not supposed to look back, you're supposed to keep going.Collection: Looks
She liked to imagine that when she passed, the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was. Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was immaculate anonymity.Collection: World
Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.Collection: Children
Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportionsCollection: Medicine
Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.Collection: Beautiful
The stains could be seen only in the sunlight, so Ruth was never really aware of them until later, when she would stop at an outdoor cafe for a cup of coffee, and look down at her skirt and see the dark traces of spilled vodka or whiskey. The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: 'booze affects material as it does people'.Collection: Coffee
My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.Collection: Names
I think that if you're somebody who's a control freak, the process would make you crazy, but I'm kind of a process freak, so I'm excited to see what he does with it. I know it's not going to be my book, so just starting with that knowledge frees me from having to get all freaked out about it.Collection: Crazy
I don't do much public speaking. I did a lot of stuff for Bones, and then ended up having said yes to a lot of things that kept me on the road for a while for that, but then I pretty much stopped. I'm touring for this book, but when the tour is done, that'll be the end of it.Collection: Book
Well, it's my voice, so it's more accessible that way, and there are also all sorts of things like plot and timelines that are already known entities, so for me, it's very different from writing fiction.Collection: Writing
I mean, if I went into my closet, I could find a previous draft and try to figure that out, but it takes a long time for me to find the voice to tell a story in. I was working from other points of view for a couple years there.Collection: Couple
I'm not a slash-and-burn kind, and I'm also not a posterity kind. They just kind of exist on my hard drive. It's like walking down the street - what you leave behind is still there, even if you never go back and revisit it.Collection: Kind
Books and novels in particular that grapple with quite a few things are difficult to explain, so I think that first line can come in a substitute for trying to form a longer sense of what the book is about.Collection: Book
A lot of people ask questions that they don't want to answer themselves, and if we're honest about the intimacy that we have with our parents, you wish them the best and you wish them the worst more than anybody else in the world. I think everyone has had a moment in their life where they wished a parent ill, and I think it's perhaps a very romantic idea that that doesn't happen.Collection: Thinking
I'm just a friendly bystander who they occasionally ask questions of. That's my level of involvement.Collection: Bystanders
I'm fine with whatever comes my way, and whatever doesn't come my way I'm fine with too. I have a very laissez-faire attitude with the whole thing.Collection: Attitude
It's something that I know how to do because I taught for a very long time, so I can do it, and I feel a responsibility to do it - for instance, in this situation, where I'm touring specifically for this period of time. But most writers are not public people. There are a few writers out there who really enjoy it and are good at it, and can both work and do that at the same time, but I'm not one of those people.Collection: Responsibility
You look invincible,' my mother said one night. I loved these times, when we seemed to feel the same thing. I turned to her, wrapped in my thin gown, and said: I am.Collection: Mother
What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.Collection: Mean
I watched my beautiful sister running . . . and I knew she was not running away from me or toward me. Like someone who has survived a gut-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a scar for eight long years.Collection: Beautiful
Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.Collection: Doors
No one on the street thought anything of the downtown girl dressed in black who had paused in the middle of midtown foot traffic. In her art student camouflage she could walk the entire length of Manhattan and, if not blend in, be classified and therefore ignored.Collection: Girl
After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury hurled directly at me for reasons I remain unsure of.Collection: Eye
He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.Collection: Special
Those who say they would rather fight to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped a thousand times. You do what you have to.Collection: Fighting
When I was raped I lost my virginity and almost lost my life. I also discarded certain assumptions I had held about how the world worked and about how safe I was.Collection: World
The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.Collection: Ignorant
He tunneled into stories where weak men changed into strong half-animals or used eye beams or magic hammers to power through steel or climb up the sides of skyscrapers. He was the Hulk when angry and Spidey the rest of the time. When he felt his heart hurt he turned into something stronger than a little boy, and he grew up this way. A heart that flashed from heart to stone, heart to stone. As I watched I thought of what Grandma Lynn liked to say when Lindsey and I rolled our eyes or grimaced behind her back. "Watch out what faces you make. You'll freeze that way.Collection: Strong
There’s no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.Collection: War
I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found how to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.Collection: Way
There was one thing my murderer didn't understand; he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.Collection: Children
She didn't even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house--it was the eyes, her dancer's carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.Collection: Eye
Hey, Ocean Eyes,” my father said. “Where’d you go on us?Collection: Father
I missed her then but it was an odd sort of missing because by then, I knew the meaning of forever.Collection: Missing Someone
Everyday he got up. Before sleep wore off, he was who he used to be. Then, as his consciousness woke, it was as if poison seeped in. At first he couldn't even get up. He lay there under a heavy weight. But then only movment could save him, and he moved and he moved and he moved, no movement being enough to make up for it. The guilt on him, the hand of God pressing down on him, saying, You were not there when your daughter needed you.Collection: Daughter
The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was away . But when people left they always came back.Collection: Years
His love for my mother wasn't about looking back and loving something that would never change. It was about loving my mother for everything -- for her brokenness and her fleeing, for her being there right then in that moment before the sun rose and the hospital staff came in. It was about touching that hair with the side of his fingertip, and knowing yet plumbing fearlessly the depths of her ocean eyes.Collection: Mother
All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why -- really know -- it will come.Collection: Desire
A father's suspicion...' she began. Is as powerful as a mother's intuition.' ~pg 87, Ruana Singh and Jack SalmonCollection: Mother
How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home?Collection: Home
The sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. "I think she listens," she said, too softly to be heard.Collection: Past
I would like to tell you that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe.Collection: Forever
She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was.Collection: Life
but, he also said it because part of him wanted more of her, this cold woman who was not exactly cold, this rock who was not stone.Collection: Rocks
Sometimes Holly seemed like she wasn't paying attention, and other times she was gone when I went looking for her. That was when she went to a part of heaven we didn't share. I missed her then, but it was and odd sort of missing because by then I knew the meaning of forever. I could not have what I wanted most: Mr. Harvey dead and me living. Heaven wasn't perfect. But I came to believe that if I watched closely, and desired, I might change the lives of those I loved on Earth.Collection: Believe
She sat in her room on the couch my parents had given up on and worked on hardening herself. Take deep breaths and hold them. Try to stay still for longer and longer periods of time. Make yourself small and like a stone. Curl the edges of yourself up and fold them under where no one can see. ~pg 29, Susie's sister Lindsey dealing with grief.Collection: Grief