The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

Take deep breaths and hold them. Try to stay still for longer and longer periods of time. Make yourself small and like a stone. Curl the edges of yourself up and fold them under where no one can see.

“When the dead are done with the living,” Franny said to me, “the living can go on to other things.” “What about the dead?” I asked. “Where do we go?” She wouldn’t answer me.

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,”