Alice Sebold

"There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven."

"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 began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life."

"Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had."

"The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy - the words on the page being sent back and forth from engaged editor to open author - is unique in my experience."

"I like gardening - it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself."

"I wake up very early in the morning. I like to start in the dark, and I never work at night, because my brain is evaporated by 4 P. M."

"For me the saddest thing was that these animals smelled the brokenness in him – the human defect – and kept away."

"Try to breathe," he said, and for the first time the only thought in my head after an instruction like that wasn't Fuck you. I breathed."

"I could not imagine my youngest standing above her soiled grandmother in the wing chair and saying, "mother, let's kill her. "That's the only choice."

"Oh sweetheart, do you really think if youseal it up, that the pain's gonna go away?"

"She wasn't actually speaking to me, she was singing a kind of lullaby of talk. But, eventually, the music stopped."

"Outside the hospital, a young girl who was selling small bouquets of daffodils, their green stems tied with lavender ribbons. I watched as my mother bought out the girl's whole stock. Nurse Eliot, who remembered my mother from eight years ago volunteered to help her when she saw her comng down the hall, her arms full of flowers. She rounded up extra water pitchers from a supply closet and together, she and my mother filled them with water and placed the flowers around my father's room while he slept. Nurse Eliot thought that if loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman, my mother had grown even more beautiful.(The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold)"

"There were also the Masters of Arcane Knowledge. Everyone begrudged their presence among the gifteds. These were the kids that could break down an engine and build it back again - no diagrams or instructions needed. They understood things in a real, not theoretical, way. They seemed not to care about their grades."

"You save yourself or you remain unsaved."