Alice Sebold

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

“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 beg...”

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

“Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.”

“You save yourself or you remain unsaved.”

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

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

“Nothing is ever certain.”

“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 dir...”

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

“Judging Natalie as my mother had judged me was, I felt like telling her son, just my ass-backward way of showing love. I'd spent my life trying to translate that language, and now I realized...”

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

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

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

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

“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...”