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.
Jiva (individual soul) is the conscious ruler of this body, in whom the five life principles come into unity, and yet that very Jiva is the Atman, because all is Atman.
A well-paid slave is nonetheless a slave.
Hate demands existence, and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behaviors; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why the Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching.
When my father started talking about strip mining in the Appalachia back in the '60s, I remember a conversation I had with him where he said, you know, this is the richest state in the country if you look at the resources and the land, but the poorest people after the state of Mississippi: the 49th poorest people in the country.
You can't have virtue without sin. What I'm after is having my characters' virtues defined by how they operate in a very sinful environment. That's how you test people.
In Kabul, hot running water had been like fathers, a rare commodity.
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