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.

— Alice Sebold

At some point, to counter the list of the dead, I had begun keeping my own list of the living. It was something I noticed Len General did too. When he was off duty he would note the young girls and elderly women and every other female in the rainbow in between and count them among the things that sustained him. The young girl in the mall whose pale legs had grown too long for her now too-young dress and who had an aching vulnerability that went straight to both Len's and my own heart. Elderly women, wobbling with walkers, who insisted on dyeing their hair unnatural versions of the colors they had in youth. Middle-aged single mothers racing around in grocery stores while their children pulled bags of candy off the shelves. When I saw them, I took count. Living, breathing women. Sometimes I saw the wounded-those who had been beaten by husbands or raped by strangers, children raped by their fathers- and I would wish to intervene somehow. Len saw these wounded women all the time. They were regulars at the station, but even when he went somewhere outside his jurisdiction he could sense them when they came near. The wife in that bait-'n'-tackle shop had no bruises on her face but cowered like a dog and spoke in apologetic whispers. The girl he saw walk the road each time he went upstate to visit his sisters. As the years passed she'd grown leaner, the fat from her cheeks had drained, and sorrow had loaded her eyes in a way that made them hang heavy and hopeless inside her allowed skin. When she was not there it worried him. When she was there it both depressed and revived him. ~Len General on stepping back/letting go/giving up pgs 271-272

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.

— Alice Sebold

He hadn't woken a day since my death when the day wasn’t something to get through. But the truth was, the memorial service day was not the worst kind. At least it was honest. At least it was a day shaped around what they were so preoccupied by: my absence. Today he would not have to pretend he was getting back to normal—whatever normal was.

— Alice Sebold

He would find his Susie, inside his young son. Give that love to the living.

— Alice Sebold

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?

— Alice Sebold

How to Commit the Perfect Murder" was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.

— Alice Sebold

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.

— Alice Sebold

I forgive you," I said. I said what I had to. Furthermore, I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.

— Alice Sebold