Alice Sebold

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

“I was like I was in science class: I was curious.”

“I don't think ignorance is a way that you gain distance on something.”

“I forgive you," I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.”

“That night my mother had what she considered a wonderful dream. She dreamed of the country of India, where she had never been. There were orange traffic cones and beautiful lapis lazuli insects with mandibles of gold. A young girl was being led through the streets. She was taken to a pyre where she was wound in a sheet and placed up on a platform built from sticks. The bright fire that consumed her brought my mother into that deep, light, dreamlike bliss. The girl was being burned alive, but, first, there had been her body, clean and whole.”

“I always had that sense of being censored for the things that I thought. Why is it wrong to embroider your pants, or paint with acrylics on your clothing? Why is that weird? Isn't it weirder to want to be like everyone else?”

“My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.”

“I think understanding is the way to gain perspective - and therefore can live among those hideous realities. You can live with them.”

“How to Commit the Perfect Murder" was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.”

“We all work hard to understand the dynamic relationship we have with a parent.”

“Nothing is ever certain.”

“It's hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you're ultimately the author, so you do have control.”

“This little girl's grown up by now," she said.Almost.Not quite.I wish you all a long and happy life.”

“I wanted to be a novelist for so long.”

“Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly.”

“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. 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.”

“There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven.”

“I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't.”

“Outside the hospital, a young girl who was selling small bouquets of daffodils, their green stems tied with lavender ribbons. I watched as my mother bought out the girl's whole stock. Nurse Eliot, who remembered my mother from eight years ago volunteered to help her when she saw her comng down the hall, her arms full of flowers. She rounded up extra water pitchers from a supply closet and together, she and my mother filled them with water and placed the flowers around my father's room while he slept. Nurse Eliot thought that if loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman, my mother had grown even more beautiful.(The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold)”

“Oh sweetheart, do you really think if youseal it up, that the pain's gonna go away?”