Quotes from Gregg Olsen

How did we get here?' Sophie asks. 'We drove our cars,' I say, teasing. She makes a face and signals for more wine. 'Funny,' she says. 'I mean to this place in our lives when everything seems so perfect but isn't?

she would abuse me, then the very next day hug me or tell me how I was her baby and she loved me blah, blah. I think it worked like any abusive relationship . . . a person feels trapped, nowhere to go . . . they are abused and then the abuser reins them back in with kindness and the person being abused settles, not quite thinking about the next time they are beat etc. just relieved the abuse is over (for now). My mother was a ticking time bomb . . .

Larvae can consume an entire human body in a week.

I'm going to get back to that place where crumble is a topping and not a way of life. "You've

I don't know why the water and the sky scare me. I wonder if it is because here at the ocean there is no place to hide.

Victims who want to get help recognize how difficult it would be to convince authorities of the sadist's behavior. They know that if they try but fail, the punishment will be severe. So, they often decide to just wait it out and hope they can eventually flee.

their stories, tell their tales, pose for pictures, and shake their heads for the TV cameras. As one high school student told the reporter from the Today show, "Nothing much ever happens around here, so this is kind of fun. Sad, but fun at the same time.

It isn't a mask that she wears to cover the past but an invisible badge of courage.

There's another, simple, idea that has been shared on the Internet: after buckling a child into a car seat, a driver takes off his or her left shoe and puts it on the back seat. Once they reach their destination, they won't go far without the shoe, and they'll be reminded of the child.

And he'd kill Lily Ann Denton, put her in the trunkm and go to arbys. God. he was hungry.

Beetles never stop. They gnaw silently and relentlessly. Guilt is like that too.

I thought that being with someone who seemed to love me was better than being alone.

You should have dragged my butt out of bed. Your butt's too big to drag, Taylor said. Hayley sat on the floor, facing her sister. That means yours is too. We have the same butt, remember? Don't remind me, Taylor said. I see it every time you walk in front of me.

But just as no one really knows what it is like to be a mother until she holds her first child, no one who hadn't felt the sudden loss of a child could ever even approximate the stabbing ache that came with every breath. I

If she pleaded not guilty, David said she could suggest that the boy had been the agressor, or maybe it was all some teenage fantasy that went too far. Maybe the sex never really happened. Mary Kay saw that scenario as ridiculous. Almost laughable. She didn't think it would work. I'm carrying his baby, she said. Scratch that.

I think it worked like any abusive relationship . . . a person feels trapped, nowhere to go . . . they are abused and then the abuser reins them back in with kindness and the person being abused settles, not quite thinking about the next time they are beat etc. just relieved the abuse is over (for now).

He's a narcissist, and I wonder what it says about me that I'm willing to sleep with a man whose eyes constantly look past me in search of his own reflection.

A warm smile, and some serious electricity passed between us. I felt it. I didn't know if she did or didn't. Hasn't everyone experienced that moment when there's a charge in the air between you and another person?

Randy had an inkling that something else was afoot. Shelly's father appeared too eager to pass his daughter off to another man.

Humor was the curtain she put around everything.

But learned personality traits aren't often based on present reality but on a past from which there is no escape.

People gravitate toward danger and drama to show concern, yes. But also to silently count their blessings that nothing like this has happened to them. That being close to the unthinkable takes them off some list that God or fate keeps track of.

that 10 percent of a nightmare is still a nightmare.

It is always easier to sleep at night if the monsters outside your house only knock when you give them cause.