Quotes from Alice Sebold

They kissed. They wanted to do more but couldn't. Samuel wanted it to be special. He was aware that it should be perfect. Lindsey just wanted to get it over with. Have it behind her so she could achieve adulthood—transcend the place and the time. She thought of sex as the Star Trek transport. You vaporized and found yourself navigating another planet within the second or two it took to realign.

I had always been in love with him. I counted the lashes of each closed eye. He had been my almost, my might-have-been, and I did not want to leave him any more than I did my family.

greatest hope. Last night it had been my father who'd

I had taken this time to fall in love instead - inn love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt inn death - the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human - feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light - all of it part of nagivating the unknown.

Porque el horror de la Tierra es real y cotidiano. Es como una flor o como el sol; no puede contenerse.

News slipped out and the world didn't explode and eventually I could count on passing out. I had a headache in the morning and I always threw up, but Jamie, and everyone, it seemed, liked me when I was drunk. The added bonus: I often didn't remember much.

Len estaba a punto de decir algo; mi madre lo vio abrir los labios, y cerró los ojos y ordenó al mundo que callara, gritando las palabras dentro de su cabeza.

No one knew how he continued to do what he did, while simultaneously they wanted him to shut all signs of his grief away, place it in a file somewhere and tuck it in a drawer that no one would be asked to open again.

He wore his own innocence like a comfortable old coat.

I wish I had known enough to do the same...tell her I loved her on that last day.

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it.

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.

The niggling idea of what she would do as Ray grew older and her husband worked increasingly long hours crept up the inside of her foot and along her calf to the back of her knee and began to climb into her lap

I was a soul back on Earth. AWOL a little while from heaven.

the lightning would come and, a few moments later, the thunder. -Susie Salmon, The Lovely Bones

Confucius-says

Your sordid life is your sordid life. You shouldn't live it if you don't like it.

In moments like this she thought of all the little girls who grew into adulthood and old age as a sort of cipher alphabet for all those who didn't. Their lives would somehow be inextricably attached to all the girls who had been killed.

Nothing is ever certain

Sometimes the dreams that came true are the dreams you never even knew you had

father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o'clock. Until the day in the yard with my

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.

We're here, you know ... All the time. You can talk to us and think about us. It doesn't have to be sad or scary.

What I'd been missing was a wanderlust that came from letting go?