Alice Sebold

I missed her then but it was an odd sort of missing because by then, I knew the meaning of forever.

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.

But I know I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead — in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death — the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human — feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light - all of it part of navigating the unknown.

but, he also said it because part of him wanted more of her, this cold woman who was not exactly cold, this rock who was not stone.

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.

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.

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.

He had been my almost. My might-have-been. I was afraid of what I wanted most - His kiss. Still, I collected kiss stories. -Susie Salmon

The sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. "I think she listens," she said, too softly to be heard.

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.

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.

There was our father, the heart we knew held all of us. Held us heavily and desperately, the doors of his heart opening and closing with the rapidity of stops on an instrument, the quiet felt closures, the ghostly fingering, practice and practice and then, incredibly, sound and melody and warmth.

Last night it had been my father who had finally said it: "She’s never coming home." A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it.

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.

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.

His love for my mother wasn't about looking back and loving something that would never change. It was about loving my mother for everything -- for her brokenness and her fleeing, for her being there right then in that moment before the sun rose and the hospital staff came in. It was about touching that hair with the side of his fingertip, and knowing yet plumbing fearlessly the depths of her ocean eyes.

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

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

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

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.