The Fact of a Body Quotes

“When a lifeline comes, you don’t evaluate whether it’s the right one. You just grab for it, and hold on.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“What I fell in love with about the law so many years ago was the way that in making a story, in making a neat narrative of events, it finds a beginning, and therefore cause. But I didn’t understand then that the law doesn’t find the beginning any more than it finds the truth. It creates a story. That story has a beginning. That story simplifies, and we call it truth.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“In the books I find the thrum of everything unsayable. The characters weep the way I want to, love the way I want to, cry, die, beat their breasts, and bray with life.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“But strangely, I am all right. The world I belong to now is the one in the books I read. When I am awake, I am reading.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“The law—with each side’s relentless pursuit of one story—has never known what to do with this complicated middle ground. But life is full of it.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“It will be years before I understand the value of softness.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“My father keeps the air-conditioning up high, and though I complain to him and to my mother, he either won’t listen or can’t believe me. And what he says makes sense: He is hot and I am hurting, but why should I think that my hurting should outweigh his hot? This is the logic I will never find an answer to, the way in my family a hurt will always be your hurt or my hurt, one to be set against the other and weighed, never the family’s hurt. Is what happens in a family the problem of the family, or the problem of the one most harmed by it? There is a cost to this kind of adversarial individualism.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“So I try something new. Not turning my back to the past, not fleeing it, but extending a hand. I say to the past, come with me, then, as I live.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“I have come to believe that every family has its defining action, its defining belief. From childhood, I understood that my parents’ was this: Never look back.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“Lyme disease is new then, barely known. The doctor hasn’t tested me for it. We can see only what we have a name for. Now he crouches in front of the table. His eyes are ice blue, too bright. “There is nothing wrong with you,” he says, and his voice is artificially high, like he is talking to a child. “Not physically. Sometimes, when a person’s very sad…” Something inside me rings. I hate him. I hate him instantly. Outside, in the parking lot,”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“dragonflies circled me, the sun knifing off the brilliant blues and yellows of their bodies.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“I remember a new heaviness in my body, but maybe that's the work of time and my looking back.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“When her boy went missing the cops did the searching and while they searched only rumors reached her. All she could do was wait. When they found her baby’s body, she let Richard arrange the funeral. When they tried his killer, her name wasn’t on the case. The state’s was. Louisiana v. Ricky Langley. Like that was whom he’d harmed. At the trial the prosecutors told her where to sit, and she sat there. They practiced with her what to say, and she said it. Your own son dies and it becomes the community’s tragedy, as though it’s the system’s tragedy. Public.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“For years I’d been afraid that if I came out, and anyone learned I’d been abused as a child, they would think that that was why I was gay. As if that had turned me gay. In my heart I knew that wasn’t it. The first time I slept with a woman, my chest opened up. I hadn’t known until that moment how closed it was. I’m gay because I love women, it’s as simple as that. But for so long the possibility that anyone might even think otherwise kept me hidden.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“The man at the center of this trial, endlessly discussed and debated, endlessly documented and dissected in what will turn out to be nearly thirty thousand pages of documents, will remain an enigma in this way. What you see in Ricky may depend more on who you are than on who he is.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“This is the logic I will never find an answer to, the way in my family a hurt will always be your hurt or my hurt, one to be set against the other and weighed, never the family’s hurt.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“The boys’ attention frees me to feel loved. The boys are a threat. I don’t know how to recognize when love and hurt are mingled. It’s all I’ve known them to be. I can’t tell who’s safe and who’s not, can’t tell what safety even is. I only know I need someone to be. *”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“I was sixteen. I didn’t know I was too young for him. I just thought his attention meant that I was worthy of love—could be loved—and that I wasn’t broken. When a lifeline comes, you don’t evaluate whether it’s the right one. You just grab for it and hold on.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“I want him to love me. I want it like a prize and because it is what I am supposed to want and because it will save me.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“It’s repeated a lot, but it isn’t true. Most pedophiles, like most other people, weren’t molested. And there’s no indication that people who were molested become pedophiles. What is true is that among pedophiles, a greater percentage were molested than the percentage of people in general who were molested—but even then, it’s not a huge increase.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“A person can be angry and still feel shame. A person can burn with hate at his mama and still love her enough to want to be something that will make her proud.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“But I look at the man on the screen, I feel my grandfather’s hands on me, and I know. Despite what I’ve trained for, despite what I’ve come here to work for, despite what I believe. I want Ricky to die.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“happened in the past. “But if you ever hear about it, don’t worry,” he said, his words a little slurred by drink. “Alexandria’s the only one who remembers it.” On the stairs, I froze. My family had always been silent about the abuse. But no one had ever implied that it hadn’t happened. My father kept talking. This moment that had changed everything inside me had changed nothing for him.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“My sisters and I stand on the deck, the shale tile cool against the soles of our feet - for a week it seems we never have to wear shoes - and take turns twirling, the matching turquoise silk skirts my mother bought us sliding coolly up our legs, our laughter flying out over the ocean. We are all light and happy and far, far away from home.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“Years later, I remember the waxy taste of the yellow paint, the papery taste of splintered wood, the sharp metallic of the graphite.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“we are prisoners of the story we tell about ourselves, the story of the parents descended from poor immigrants who made it good and now have the Cadillacs and the beautiful, successful children and the most porch lights at Christmas. We are so determinedly fine it must be overwhelming for them to have a daughter who has suddenly shown up with the marks of all that is not fine so visibly on her.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“But is an act ever really only about itself? Does any element of this story occur in isolation? I”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“Consistency is what we prize, and coherency, and reason, and to be true to our ideals so that they fit together into the neat puzzle of us.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“empty. It”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“The man who sits down across from me is a man. He'll never be all one thing or the other. Only a story can be that. Never a person.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir