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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of keeping personal thoughts and creations private, rather than treating them casually.
Alice Sebold's quote expresses a deep appreciation for the sanctity of personal expression found in journals and poetry. It highlights the idea that genuine feelings and thoughts should be kept safe and not shared as if they were trivial, suggesting that true vulnerability and intimacy come from honoring our private worlds instead of broadcasting them carelessly.
In practice
In a writing workshop, to emphasize the importance of personal reflection before sharing work.
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.
The stains could be seen only in the sunlight, so Ruth was never really aware of them until later, when she would stop at an outdoor cafe for a cup of coffee, and look down at her skirt and see the dark traces of spilled vodka or whiskey. The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: 'booze affects material as it does people'.
Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.
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.
She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was.
There was one thing my murderer didn't understand; he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.
… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
We ought to do good to others as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.
We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.
The old grooves must be erased in your brain, without forming new ones. You must realize yourself as the immovable, behind and beyond the movable, the silent witness of all that happens.
Some people, with a certain nostalgia, the worshippers and admirers of the colonial system, cherish and nurse its structures instead of smashing them. This is typical of a mentality in bondage to decadent values, negative values - counter-revolutionary values.
Tyler lies back and asks, "If Marilyn Monroe were alive right now, what would she be doing?" I say, goodnight. The headliner hangs down in shreds from the ceiling and Tyler says, "Clawing at the lid of her coffin.
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