Alice Sebold quotes:

The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy - the words on the page being sent back and forth from engaged editor to open author - is unique in my experience.

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

I wake up very early in the morning. I like to start in the dark, and I never work at night, because my brain is evaporated by 4 P.M.

I fell in love with you again; While you were away - Jack Salmon

I wanted to be the moron of the family, because morons seemed to have more fun, more freedom and more personality.

He took the hat from my mouth. ''Tell me you love me'', he said. Gently I did. The end came anyway

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

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.

I was in the air around him. I was in the cold mornings he had now. I was in the quiet time he spent alone. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. -Susie Salmon

Please don't let Daddy die Susie," he whispered. "I need him.

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

I went to church irregularly and was mostly reading comics in the pew.

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

For me, heaven would be a lack of alienation. The whole time I was growing up, I felt comfort was inherently evil. I think that, for me, heaven isn't about couches and milk shakes and never having a troubling thought again.

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.

I find talking about my work harder than it might be if honesty wasn't my calling card.

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.

To me, the idea of heaven would give you certain pleasures, certain joys - but it's very important to have an intellectual understanding of why you want those things.

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.

What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.

He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.

I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines.

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

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.

You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any other girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate.

I have never been shy about listening to the input of others and weighing it seriously.

I think you only learn what kind of personality you have by committing to things.

Ruth hadn't talked to my sister since before my death, and then it was only to excuse herself in the hallway at school. But she'd seen Lindsey walking home with Samuel and seen her smile with him. She watched as my sister said yes to pancakes and no to everything else. She had tried to imagine herself being my sister as she had spent time imagining being me.

I would like to tell you that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe.

I think it's an interesting thing to me, because we have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things.

Like a medical procedure,' Ruth said. 'Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet.

So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything.

As she brought prospective buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag.

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

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

He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.

Nothing is ever certain.

What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child

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

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

You save yourself or you remain unsaved.

A father's suspicion...' she began. Is as powerful as a mother's intuition.' ~pg 87, Ruana Singh and Jack Salmon

I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.

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.

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.

The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.

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.

Hold still," my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.

I have always felt extremely weird. But I am very happy with my weirdnesses, and I want other people to be very happy with theirs.

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?

I'm gradually working through my obsessions, and maybe, when they're all free and clear, I'll write a comedy. But I'm not there yet.

I like gardening - it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.

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.

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.

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.

Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.

Your first kiss is destiny knocking.

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.

Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.

Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.

Depending on where I am in the process, sometimes I have a page count and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I have an hour count; sometimes I'm just happy to string a few words together. I do keep pretty rigorous hours, because otherwise you never get anything done.

Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.

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.

Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world.

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.

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?

To transform experience and thought into language and narrative - that is beautiful even if that beauty is in brokenness.

There was one thing my murderer didn't understand; he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.

Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?

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.

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.

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.

Thereâ??s no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.

I'm just a friendly bystander who they occasionally ask questions of. That's my level of involvement.

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.

For me, heaven would be a lack of alienation. The whole time I was growing up, I felt comfort was inherently evil. I think that, for me, heaven isnt about couches and milk shakes and never having a troubling thought again.

I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.

I would do exactly what you are doing: I would talk to everyone I needed to, I would not tell too many people his name. When I was sure," she said, "I would find a quiet way, and I would kill him.

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.

Like snowflakes,' Franny said,'none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before

He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.

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.

As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.

People grow up by living.

You're not supposed to look back, you're supposed to keep going.

I wish you all a long and happy life

But also I wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was granted one weak grace. Back in the room where the green chair was still warm from his body, I blew that lonely, flickering candle out

Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.

Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.

We have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things. So it made sense to me to reflect the human condition that not every action has an explanation. We act, and then later maybe come to an understanding about it, or maybe not.

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.

When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things," Franny said. "What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?

I tried to take solace in Holiday, our dog. I missed him in a way I hadn't yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound silly but I didn't believe it, would not believe it.

Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.

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.

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

All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why -- really know -- it will come.

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.

Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.

I loved the way the burned-out flashcubes of the Kodak Instamatic marked a moment that had passed, one that would now be gone forever except for a picture.

Since then I've always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse; rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.

It's very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.

Part of the creative process for me is an invitation for readers to follow their imagination.

But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone. ~pg 254

My father had not been outside the house except to drive back and forth to work or sit out in the backyard, for months, nor had he seen his neighbors. Now he looked at them, from face to face, until he realized I had been loved by people he didn't even recognize. His heart filled up, warm again as it had not been in what seemed so long to him- save small forgotten moments with Buckley, the accidents of love that happened with his son. ~pgs 209-210; Buckley, Lindsey and Jack on Susie

I couldn't help but think, as I watched him, of the barrels of toxic fluids that had accrued behind Hal's bike shop where the scrub lining the railroad tracks had offered local companies enough cover to dump a stray contaner or two. Everything had been sealed up, but things were beginning to leak out. I had come to both pity and respect Len in the years since my mother left. He followed the physical to try to understand things that were impossible to comphrehend. In that, I could see, he was like me.

I was trying to prove to them and to myself that I was still who I had always been. I was beautiful, if fat. I was smart, if loud. I was good, if ruined.

If I had but an hour of love,if that be all that is given me,an hour of love upon this earth,I would give my love to thee.

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.

I knew something as I watched: almost everyone was saying goodbye to me. I was becoming one of the many little-girl-losts. They would go back to their homes and put me to rest, a letter from the past never to be reopened or reread. And I could say goodbye to them, wish them well, bless them somehow for their good thoughts. A handshake in the street, a dropped item picked up and retrieved and handed back, or a friendly wave from the distant window, a nod, a smile, a moment when the eyes lock over the antics of a child.

Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.

Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.

In this deeply nuanced portrait of an American family, Bret Anthony Johnston fearlessly explores the truth behind a mythic happy ending. In Remember Me Like This, Johnston presents an incisive dismantling of an all-too-comforting fallacy: that in being found we are no longer lost.

I dont think ignorance is a way that you gain distance on something.

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