Alice Sebold Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

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.

When I was raped I lost my virginity and almost lost my life. I also discarded certain assumptions I had held about how the world worked and about how safe I was.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything.

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

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

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.

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