Quotes from Lucky

“I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“No one can pull anyone back from anywhere. You save yourself or you remain unsaved.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“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.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“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.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“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.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“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.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“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, quote from Lucky

“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.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“...memory could save, that it had power, that it was often the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed, or the brutalized.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“My life was over; my life had just begun.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“By the time I was eighteen, she had sat me down and detailed her alcoholism, its onset and aftermath. She believed that by sharing such things I might be able to avoid them or, if need be, recognize them when they occurred. By talking about them to her children, she was also acknowledging that they were real and that they had an effect on us too, that things like this shaped a family, not just the person they happened to.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“I was unable to recognize something that I would come up against time and time again. You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate. So how could I be both..?”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“I now think that was distanced me from Tricia and from the Rape Crisis Center was their use of generalities. I did not want to be one of a group or compared with others. It somehow blindsided my sense that I was going to survive. Tricia prepared me for failure by saying that it would be okay if I failed. She did this by showing me that the odds out there were against me. But what she told me, I didn't want to hear. In the face of dismal statistics regarding arrest, prosecution, and even full recovery for the victim, I saw no choice but to ignore the statistics. I needed what gave me hope, like being assigned a female assistant district attorney, not the news that the number of rape prosecutions in Syracuse for that calendar year had been nil.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this story by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“For Lorenz, virgins were not a part of his world. He was skeptical of many things I said. Later, when the serology reports proved that what I had said was not a lie, that I had been a virgin, and that I was telling the truth, he could not respect me enough. I think he felt responsible, somehow. It was, after all, in his world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“You save yourself or you remain unsaved”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“My father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o'clock. Until the day in the yard with my playmate I thought this was what fathers did. Then I began to catalog and notice. They mowed lawns. They drank beer. They played in the yard with their kids, walked around the block with their wives, piled into campers, and, when they went out, wore joke ties or polo shirts, not Phi Beta Kappa keys and tailored vests.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“Nikt nie może wyratować drugiego człowieka. Każdy musi ratować się sam albo jest stracony.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“I explained myself like this: I did not feel adamant about saying no, but I also didn't feel adamant about saying yes, so until I felt strongly one way or another, I'd stick with no.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

“father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o’clock. Until the day in the yard with my”
― Alice Sebold, quote from Lucky

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Popular quotes

“I have to think it's possible to suffer a great wrong and walk away from it. To build a life of small, exquisitely important moments.”
― Cinda Williams Chima, quote from The Wizard Heir

“You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.”
― John Irving, quote from Until I Find You

“In Laos, a baby was never apart from its mother, sleeping in her arms all night and riding on her back all day. Small children were rarely abused; it was believed that a dab who witnessed mistreatment might take the child, assuming it was not wanted. The Hmong who live in the United States have continued to be unusually attentive parents. A study conducted at the University of Minnesota found Hmong infants in the first month of life to be less irritable and more securely attached to their mothers than Caucasian infants, a difference the researcher attributed to the fact that the Hmong mothers were, without exception, more sensitive, more accepting, and more responsive, as well as “exquisitely attuned” to their children’s signals. Another study, conducted in Portland, Oregon, found that Hmong mothers held and touched their babies far more frequently than Caucasian mothers. In a third study, conducted at the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minnesota, a group of Hmong mothers of toddlers surpassed a group of Caucasian mothers of similar socioeconomic status in every one of fourteen categories selected from the Egeland Mother-Child Rating Scale, ranging from “Speed of Responsiveness to Fussing and Crying” to “Delight.”
― Anne Fadiman, quote from The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

“I don’t want you going there without me, ever…do you understand what I am saying?” he asks me, searching my face, probably looking for any sign of dissention.
“Let me get this straight, what if I got a craving for…I don’t know…Twinkies in the wee hours of the morning and all that was open was the Seven-Eleven. You’re saying I should wake you up, even if you’re crashed out, just so that you can go with me on a treat run?” I ask skeptically, trying to gauge his level of commitment to this course of action.
“Genevieve, Twinkies are really bad for you, but if you had to have one, then yes, that’s what I’m saying,” he smiles at my scenario. “Do you really like those things?”
“I’m not going to tell you if you’re going to tease me, but I will say that it’s suspiciously inhuman not to enjoy a Hostess snack from time to time,” I reply coyly. “I’ll buy you one. You’ll love it, I promise.”
And I’ll be doing the world a favor at the same time, I think, remembering him without his shirt on.”
― Amy A. Bartol, quote from Inescapable

“What pleases your eyes?” he asked. “You,” I said without hesitation.”
― Mary Ting, quote from Crossroads

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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