Quotes from Alice Sebold

She wasn't actually speaking to me, she was singing a kind of lullaby of talk. But, eventually, the music stopped.

Do you know how alone I've always felt?

I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind of rebel. Helpless, really.

I can't describe what I'm feeling, she said. To anyone.

For Lorenz, virgins were not a part of his world. He was skeptical of many things I said. Later, when the serology reports proved that what I had said was not a lie, that I had been a virgin, and that I was telling the truth, he could not respect me enough. I think he felt responsible, somehow. It was, after all, in his world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime.

Every time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.

I would do what I did best, I thought. I would wait. It was only a matter of time, after all.

Almost, not quite,I wish you all a long and happy Life

She was armed to the teeth for any onslaught of sympathy.

For three nights he hadn't known how to touch my mother or what to say. Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow the stronger one's strength. And they had never understood, as they did now, what the word horror meant. ~pgs 20-21

To take the tops off all the houses and mingle our miseries was too simple a solution, I knew. Houses had windows with shades. Yards had gates and fences. There were carefully planned out sidewalks and roads, and these were the paths that, if you chose to go into someone else's reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.

You can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth.

Her brain was a storm, her usual insight gone.

They would go back to their homes and put me to rest, a letter from the past never reopened or reread.

Ruth had been a girl haunted and now she would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of it, the story of my life and death, was hers if she chose to tell it, even to one person at a time.

Everything in her wanted to run -fly back to California, back to her quiet existence working among strangers. Hiding out in the folds of tree trunks and tropical petals, tucked away safely among so many foreign plants and people.

Since their first kiss in our kitchen two weeks after my death, I had known that he was - as my sister and I had giggled with our Barbies or while watching Bobby Sherman on TV - her one and only. Samuel had pressed himself into her need and the cement between the two of them had begun to set immediately. They had gone to Temple together, side by side. He had hated it and she had pushed him through. She had loved it and this had allowed him to survive.

The living room seemed to be where no living ever actually occurred.

I was here for a moment, and then I was gone. I wish you all a long and happy life.

our heartache poured into one another like water from cup to cup.

Susie? Yes? Just have fun, kid.

When she saw a strange man whom she didn't trust, she did an immediate breakdown in her mind. It was quicker - honoring the pragmatics of fear - than pretending she shouldn't think this way.

And a soul would run by a living being, touch them softly on the shoulder or cheek, and continue on its way to heaven. The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see a figure standing at the end of their bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus.

When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living—to learn to accept?