Alice Sebold Quotes

If you woke up, every day, and someone punched you in the face, for the first week, you'd go, 'Why is someone punching me in the face?' But, by the time you got through week two, you'd take it and just go on with the day.

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

If you feel more emotion looking at a picture of queuing lorries than a picture of desperate humans living in a lay-by, you need to check your bedtime routine for someone beating you round the head with a meat tenderiser.

I think people are getting more and more - unfortunately - inured to violence. People are like, less sensitive to things they should wake up about.

I wanted to write something from a child's viewpoint... Five of the characters I have played in movies have either been abused or became abusers, themselves, and I just kind of felt like there was a need.

It's extraordinary what children put up with. I happened to see two of my uncles put my father up against the wall of my grandmother's house and knock his teeth out, because he'd been unpleasant to my mother. The next day I went upstairs and found my father making a rather half-hearted attempt to gas himself.

We bear witness to the worst of human brutality, retweet what we have witnessed, and then we move on to the next atrocity. There is always more atrocity.

America's a very traumatized society.

The fact is that trauma and risk taking hadn't become scarier over the years; it had become more normal.

I have been touched by extreme violence, and I have been robbed of the life I always wanted by someone who chose to do evil.

My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life.

If you give me any problem in America I can trace it down to domestic violence. It is the cradle of most of the problems, economic, psychological, educational.

Even if a woman is abused a very long time ago, it comes out in her life in a negative way.

I grew up around a lot of aggressive guys. My parents used to take me to AA meetings when I was very young. So I know aggression, I know insanity.

At 17, the first time I saw a dead body, I froze. By 31 it was a natural occurrence for me, and no group of people should live like that.

I believe that everybody comes from pain and a certain amount of dysfunction.

I was always a sensitive, sweet kid, but I got brutalized and I became brutal. And frankly, I don't think it was my natural makeup. I don't think its anyone's natural makeup to be a violent brawler.

Naturally, it is a terrible, despicable crime when, as in Munich, people are taken hostage, people are killed. But probing the motives of those responsible and showing that they are also individuals with families and have their own story does not excuse what they did.

I don't know many South Africans who don't have their eyes wide open to what it's like to be exposed to some sort of violence. The question is whether we choose to be cynical about it or not.

Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence.

It takes 4 generations to heal one act of violence

Violence is a commodity in the U. S. and the culture of violence is toxic.

My dad was a violent alcoholic. Really aggressive.

I'm not desensitized to death.

Any sympathy won for Aileen Wuornos based on a lie is not sympathy at all. The question is, can we have sympathy for the circumstances of someone's life? That's what I was interested in.