What She Left Behind Quotes

“Within minutes of setting foot on the grounds of the shuttered Willard State Asylum, seventeen-year-old Isabelle Stone knew it was a mistake.”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“Animals are innocent. People are . . . well, they’re not innocent. Animals are better than humans.”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“The world was full of broken people, and all the hospitals and institutions and jails could never mend their fractured hearts, wounded minds, and trampled spirits.”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“She wondered how many were like Clara, normal one minute, locked up the next. What would have happened if the patients had been asked what had happened to them instead of what was wrong with them?”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“Either way, the thought of entire lives lost—family celebrations, Christmases and birthdays, love affairs and bedtime stories, weddings and high school graduations—because of a misfire or unexplained chaos inside a person’s brain, made her chest constrict. It wasn’t fair.”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“The earth and everything on it was cast black for those last few minutes of daylight, as if evil ruled the world for that short period of time, before the stars and moon came out to illuminate the night sky and remind everyone and everything that there really was lightness and goodness in the universe, that there really was hope and heaven.”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“Hindsight is always 20/20”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“How desperate did a person have to become before they broke the law to survive?”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“A 1926 U.S. Eugenics poster claimed “Some people are born to be a burden on the rest,” and reminded people that every sixteen seconds a person is born and one hundred dollars of their money goes toward the care of persons with bad heredity, such as the insane, feeble-minded, criminals, and other defectives.”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“I won’t let my past define my future,”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“That was when she realized physical pain made emotional pain disappear for a few minutes,”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“Treatment of the insane was different back then, along with the definition of what it meant to be mentally ill. He was just doing what was expected of him at the time. As far as his reasons for admitting your real father to the asylum, we can’t be sure.”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“standing over them, one hand gripping”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“Ruth had proclaimed that if preventive measures weren’t taken right away, Clara’s posture and health would suffer, and no man in his right mind would marry a romping girl with a waist measuring more than seventeen inches.”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“staring at the picture of President Clinton and Monica Lewinski”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“She couldn’t imagine a father hurting his child. Or a mother failing to protect her child.”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“Decorated to look and feel homey in an attempt to make the patients relax, the room had the opposite effect on Clara. To her, it felt like a mockery, an attempt to placate patients into thinking their needs were being met while years and months slipped by. Their lives were disappearing and no one was making an attempt to help get them back.”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“I wasn’t sick,” Madeline said. “I’d just come back from asking my no-good husband to give me a little money for food. He beat the tar out of me. Took me a week before I could get out of bed other than to use the bathroom. After the cops took me in, the doctor said I was below normal physically and should go to the hospital. But that damn landlady said I used vulgar language and talked to myself, so they sent me to the loony bin instead.” Clara”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“Clara opened the ivory doors leading into the parlor and motioned Bruno inside.”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“could”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“Sure, she was going to turn eighteen in less than a year. She’d been in the system long enough to know that eighteenth birthdays weren’t marked by celebrations. When the checks stopped coming, she’d be on her own. “Aging out” of foster care meant becoming homeless. She’d heard stories of kids ending up in jail and hospital emergency rooms, selling drugs, living on welfare and food stamps. How desperate did a person have to become before they broke the law to survive? For now, things were good, and she didn’t want to mess that up.”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“Isabelle—her father used to call her Izzy—should have been enjoying the warm sunshine and beautiful view. Instead, she grit her teeth and struggled to push the image of a bleeding hole in her father’s skull from her mind. She felt like she was trapped in purgatory. Would she ever find peace, or would she always be that seven-year-old girl, reliving the horrible night her father was murdered?”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“wondered what horrors the hulking building”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“First and foremost, this novel would not have come to fruition if not for the work of Darby Penney and Peter Stastny, authors of The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic.”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“Mr. Glen and Nurse May took off their coats”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“But”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“conversation faded.”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“States. According to Edwin Black, award-winning author of War”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind

“She had to do something to put an end to Shannon’s bullying, but what? And how? It was obvious that Shannon ruled the school. No one had the nerve to stand up to her.”
― Ellen Marie Wiseman, What She Left Behind