Quotes from Alice Sebold

She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was.

Samuel walked out to Lindsey then, and there she was in his arms, my sweet butterball babe, born ten years after my fourteen years on Earth: Abigail Suzanne. Little Susie to me. Samuel placed Susie on a blanket near the flowers. And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.

Mi madre era eterna como la luna. Viva o muerta, la madre o la ausencia de la madre siempre determina la vida de una persona.

If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling, you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth.

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.

After a few days in heaven, I realized that the javelin-throwers and the shot-putters and the boys who played basketball on the cracked blacktop were all in their own version of heaven. Theirs just fit with mine- didn't duplicate it precisely, but had a lot of the same things going on inside. ~pg 17

At nearly two months,the idea of it as news was fading in the hearts of all but my family-and Ruth

In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this story by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky.

When Lindsey and I played Barbies Barbie and Ken got married at sixteen. To us there was only one true love in everyone's life we have no concept of compromise or retries.

You don't notice the dead leaving when they really hoose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down.

Heaven wasn't perfect.

When they reached the lobby and the doors opened I knew they were meant to be there, the four of them, alone.

Stones and bones; snow and frost; seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Daddy misses! His two little frogs of girls, that's who. They know where they are, do you, do you?

I was unable to recognize something that I would come up against time and time again. You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate. So how could I be both..?

My mother gave Lindsey a meaningful look. 'We are not discussing this further. You can go up to your room and wait or wait with me. Your choice.' Lindsey was dumbfounded. She stared at our mother and knew what she wanted most: to flee, to run out into the cornfield where my father was, where I was, where she felt suddenly that the heart of her family had moved. But Buckley wtood warm against her. ~pg 143; Lindsey, Buckley and Mom

I had wondered if all mothers shared a fear of how vibrant and alive their children were.

Exactly,' she said, and made her point as simply as that. There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven. ~pg 8

I knew my mother's limitations because they formed the marrow of my bones.

She wasn't much of a talker when there was nothing to say.

She was in the downstairs bathroom sneaking bites from the macaroons my father's firm always sent us for Christmas. She ate them greedily they were like suns bursting open in her mouth.

When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things.

You're dead and you have to accept it.

I focused very hard on the dead geranium in his line of vision. I thought if I could make it bloom he would have his answer. In my heaven it bloomed. In my heaven geranium petals swirled in eddies up to my waist. On Earth nothing happened... I stood alone in a sea of bright petals.

The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.