Top 100 Alice Sebold Quotes
#2. I feel like I'm standing in the wake of a volcano erruption.
Alice Sebold
#3. You're not supposed to look back, you're supposed to keep going.
Alice Sebold
#4. I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines.
Alice Sebold
#5. I could not imagine my youngest standing above her soiled grandmother in the wing chair and saying, "mother, let's kill her. "That's the only choice.
Alice Sebold
#6. She had needed the time to know that this love would not destroy her, and I had, I now knew, given her that time, could give it, for it was what I had in great supply.
Alice Sebold
#7. I had taken this time to fall in love instead - inn love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt inn death - the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human - feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light - all of it part of nagivating the unknown.
Alice Sebold
#8. In my 20s, I railed against anything 'spiritual'; I thought it was all crap.
Alice Sebold
#9. When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily
Alice Sebold
#10. Well, it's my voice, so it's more accessible that way, and there are also all sorts of things like plot and timelines that are already known entities, so for me, it's very different from writing fiction.
Alice Sebold
#11. I think that if you're somebody who's a control freak, the process would make you crazy, but I'm kind of a process freak, so I'm excited to see what he does with it. I know it's not going to be my book, so just starting with that knowledge frees me from having to get all freaked out about it.
Alice Sebold
#12. Stones and bones; snow and frost; seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Daddy misses! His two little frogs of girls, that's who. They know where they are, do you, do you?
Alice Sebold
#13. The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was away . But when people left they always came back.
Alice Sebold
#14. He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.
Alice Sebold
#15. Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
Alice Sebold
#16. At fourteen my sister sailed away from me into a place I'd never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.
Alice Sebold
#17. You look invincible,' my mother said one night.
I loved these times, when we seemed to feel the same thing. I turned to her, wrapped in my thin gown, and said:
I am.
Alice Sebold
#18. These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors. She kept an honor code with her journals and her poems. 'Inside, inside,' she would whisper quietly to herself when she felt the urge to tell ...
Alice Sebold
#19. I would do exactly what you are doing: I would talk to everyone I needed to, I would not tell too many people his name. When I was sure," she said, "I would find a quiet way, and I would kill him.
Alice Sebold
#20. Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow from the stronger one's strength.
Alice Sebold
#21. I was raised by a solitary woman to be a solitary child, and that was, I now saw, what I had hopelessly become.
Alice Sebold
#22. I'm gradually working through my obsessions, and maybe, when they're all free and clear, I'll write a comedy. But I'm not there yet.
Alice Sebold
#23. When they reached the lobby and the doors opened I knew they were meant to be there, the four of them, alone.
Alice Sebold
#24. Finally, I thought, I had reached the future that was no future.
Alice Sebold
#25. How to Commit the Perfect Murder was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.
Alice Sebold
#26. The earth has a mouth?" Buckley asked.
A big round mouth but with no lips," my father said.
Jack," my mother said, laughing, "stop it. Do you know I caught him outside growling at the snapdragons?
Alice Sebold
#27. Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go
Alice Sebold
#28. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. He didn't want to burn my photo or toss it away, but he didn't want to look at me anymore, either.
Alice Sebold
#29. For me, heaven would be a lack of alienation. The whole time I was growing up, I felt comfort was inherently evil. I think that, for me, heaven isn't about couches and milk shakes and never having a troubling thought again.
Alice Sebold
#30. He wore his own innocence like a comfortable old coat.
Alice Sebold
#31. 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 else can see.
Alice Sebold
#32. I'm not a slash-and-burn kind, and I'm also not a posterity kind. They just kind of exist on my hard drive. It's like walking down the street - what you leave behind is still there, even if you never go back and revisit it.
Alice Sebold
#33. At the tips of the feathers there is air and at their base: blood. I hold up bones; I wish like broken glass they could court light ... still I try to place these pieces back together, to set them firm, to make murdered girls live again.
Alice Sebold
#35. How can I be expected to be trapped for the rest of my life by a man frozen in time?
Alice Sebold
#36. I don't think ignorance is a way that you gain distance on something.
Alice Sebold
#37. I find talking about my work harder than it might be if honesty wasn't my calling card.
Alice Sebold
#38. What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child
Alice Sebold
#39. 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.
Alice Sebold
#40. I have never been shy about listening to the input of others and weighing it seriously.
Alice Sebold
#42. I forgive you, I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.
Alice Sebold
#45. But, he also said it because part of him wanted more of her, this cold woman who was not exactly cold, this rock who was not stone.
Alice Sebold
#46. I wanted to be the moron of the family, because morons seemed to have more fun, more freedom and more personality.
Alice Sebold
#47. He had been my almost. My might-have-been.
I was afraid of what I wanted most - His kiss.
Still, I collected kiss stories.
-Susie Salmon
Alice Sebold
#48. I missed her then but it was an odd sort of missing because by then, I knew the meaning of forever.
Alice Sebold
#49. Those who say they would rather fight to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped a thousand times. You do what you have to.
Alice Sebold
#50. I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.
Alice Sebold
#51. I mean, if I went into my closet, I could find a previous draft and try to figure that out, but it takes a long time for me to find the voice to tell a story in. I was working from other points of view for a couple years there.
Alice Sebold
#52. When I was raped I lost my virginity and almost lost my life. I also discarded certain assumptions I had held about how the world worked and about how safe I was.
Alice Sebold
#53. I watched my beautiful sister running ... and I knew she was not running away from me or toward me. Like someone who has survived a gut-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a scar for eight long years.
Alice Sebold
#54. At nearly two months,the idea of it as news was fading in the hearts of all but my family-and Ruth
Alice Sebold
#55. Everything in her wanted to run -fly back to California, back to her quiet existence working among strangers. Hiding out in the folds of tree trunks and tropical petals, tucked away safely among so many foreign plants and people.
Alice Sebold
#57. The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.
Alice Sebold
#59. Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.
Alice Sebold
#60. They would go back to their homes and put me to rest, a letter from the past never reopened or reread.
Alice Sebold
#61. I have never liked the phone. Ten years ago, during a misguided fit of self-improvement, I pasted smiley-faced stickers on the phone in my bedroom and on the one in the kitchen. Then I typed out two labels and taped them to the handsets. "It's an opportunity, not an attack," they read.
Alice Sebold
#62. She wasn't much of a talker when there was nothing to say.
Alice Sebold
#63. She liked to imagine that when she passed, the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was. Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was immaculate anonymity.
Alice Sebold
#64. She thought of sex as the Star Trek transport.You vaporized and found yourself navigating another planet within the second or two it took to realign.
Alice Sebold
#65. Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.
Alice Sebold
#66. In the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway
Alice Sebold
#67. I would like to tell you that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe.
Alice Sebold
#68. Her brain was a storm, her usual insight gone.
Alice Sebold
#70. I had wondered if all mothers shared a fear of how vibrant and alive their children were.
Alice Sebold
#71. Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult.
Alice Sebold
#72. Sometimes cats fall ten flights out of the windows of highrises and land on their feet. You only believe it because you've seen it in print.
Alice Sebold
#73. Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.
Alice Sebold
#74. When he felt his heart hurt he turned into something stronger than a little boy, and he grew up this way. A heart that flashed from heart to stone, heart to stone.
Alice Sebold
#75. I think understanding is the way to gain perspective - and therefore can live among those hideous realities. You can live with them.
Alice Sebold
#76. Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.
Alice Sebold
#77. There's no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.
Alice Sebold
#78. Had my brother really seen me somehow, or was he merely a boy telling beautiful lies?
Alice Sebold
#81. I explained myself like this: I did not feel adamant about saying no, but I also didn't feel adamant about saying yes, so until I felt strongly one way or another, I'd stick with no.
Alice Sebold
#82. I felt like observing my way out of there, but I didn't.
Alice Sebold
#83. The sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. "I think she listens," she said, too softly to be heard.
Alice Sebold
#84. Every time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.
Alice Sebold
#85. All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why
really know
it will come.
Alice Sebold
#86. I was here for a moment, and then I was gone. I wish you all a long and happy life.
Alice Sebold
#89. The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see a figure standing at the end of thier bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus.
Alice Sebold
#90. Last night it had been my father who had finally said it: "She's never coming home." A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it.
Alice Sebold
#91. There was our father, the heart we knew held all of us. Held us heavily and desperately, the doors of his heart opening and closing with the rapidity of stops on an instrument, the quiet felt closures, the ghostly fingering, practice and practice and then, incredibly, sound and melody and warmth.
Alice Sebold
#93. This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one
Alice Sebold
#94. Like snowflakes,' Franny said,'none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before
Alice Sebold
#95. No one on the street thought anything of the downtown girl dressed in black who had paused in the middle of midtown foot traffic. In her art student camouflage she could walk the entire length of Manhattan and, if not blend in, be classified and therefore ignored.
Alice Sebold
#96. So much in life is about almosts, not quites.
Alice Sebold
#97. She was armed to the teeth for any onslaught of sympathy.
Alice Sebold
#98. Do you miss Susie?"
Because it was dark, because Ruth was facing away from her,because Ruth was almost a stranger, Lindsey said what she felt.
"More than anyone will ever know.
Alice Sebold
#99. He took the hat from my mouth. 'Tell me you love me', he said. Gently I did. The end came anyway
Alice Sebold
#100. When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living - to learn to accept?
Alice Sebold
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