Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I forgive you," I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.
I'm just a friendly bystander who they occasionally ask questions of. That's my level of involvement.
If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.
Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.
I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.
He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.
How to Commit the Perfect Murder" was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.
She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was.
One thing about failing repeatedly: If you're still doing it after you've failed that much, you really mean it.
There was one thing my murderer didn't understand; he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.
All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why -- really know -- it will come.
A father's suspicion...' she began. Is as powerful as a mother's intuition.' ~pg 87, Ruana Singh and Jack Salmon
Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
I wanted to be the moron of the family, because morons seemed to have more fun, more freedom and more personality.
The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was away . But when people left they always came back.
Like snowflakes,' Franny said,'none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before
As she brought prospective buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag.
The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.
How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home?
To transform experience and thought into language and narrative - that is beautiful even if that beauty is in brokenness.
If I had but an hour of love,if that be all that is given me,an hour of love upon this earth,I would give my love to thee.
He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.
You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any other girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate.
I have always felt extremely weird. But I am very happy with my weirdnesses, and I want other people to be very happy with theirs.
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 think understanding is the way to gain perspective - and therefore can live among those hideous realities. You can live with them.
I'm gradually working through my obsessions, and maybe, when they're all free and clear, I'll write a comedy. But I'm not there yet.
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.
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
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.
"When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things," Franny said. "What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?"
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.
But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone. ~pg 254
I'm fine with whatever comes my way, and whatever doesn't come my way I'm fine with too. I have a very laissez-faire attitude with the whole thing.
Between a man and a woman there was always one person who was stronger than the other one. That doesn’t mean the weaker one doesn’t love the stronger.
I had always been in love with him. I counted the lashes of each closed eye. He had been my almost, my might have been, and I did not want to leave him
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.
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.
I loved the way the burned-out flashcubes of the Kodak Instamatic marked a moment that had passed, one that would now be gone forever except for a picture.
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.
Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.
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.
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.
At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.
What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child
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.
To me, the idea of heaven would give you certain pleasures, certain joys - but it's very important to have an intellectual understanding of why you want those things.
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.
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.
Since then I've always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse; rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.