276 Quotes by Alice Sebold

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

I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. He didn’t want to burn my photo or toss it away, but he didn’t want to look at me anymore, either.

Please don’t let Daddy die Susie,” he whispered. “I need him.

Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult.

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.

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.

These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors. She kept an honor code with her journals and her poems. ‘Inside, inside,’ she would whisper quietly to herself when she felt the urge to tell...

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.

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