Top 100 Quotes About Sebold
#1. Visitation Street is urban opera writ large. Gritty and magical, filled with mystery, poetry and pain, Ivy Pochoda's voice recalls Richard Price, Junot Diaz, and even Alice Sebold, yet it's indelibly her own.
Dennis Lehane
#2. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about "getting down in the pit and loving somebody." She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.
Jonathan Franzen
#4. I focused very hard on the dead geranium in his line of vision. I thought if I could make it bloom he would have his answer. In my heaven it bloomed. In my heaven geranium petals swirled in eddies up to my waist. On Earth nothing happened ... I stood alone in a sea of bright petals.
Alice Sebold
#5. I have always felt extremely weird. But I am very happy with my weirdnesses, and I want other people to be very happy with theirs.
Alice Sebold
#6. I always had that sense of being censored for the things that I thought. Why is it wrong to embroider your pants, or paint with acrylics on your clothing? Why is that weird? Isn't it weirder to want to be like everyone else?
Alice Sebold
#7. I feel like I'm standing in the wake of a volcano erruption.
Alice Sebold
#8. You're not supposed to look back, you're supposed to keep going.
Alice Sebold
#9. I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines.
Alice Sebold
#10. 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 an immaculate anonymity.
Alice Sebold
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. If I had but an hour of love,if that be all that is given me,an hour of love upon this earth,I would give my love to thee.
Alice Sebold
#14. 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
#15. In my 20s, I railed against anything 'spiritual'; I thought it was all crap.
Alice Sebold
#16. When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily
Alice Sebold
#17. Only by thinking I had freedom had I come to understand how imprisoned I was.
Alice Sebold
#18. 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
#19. Since then I've always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse; rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.
Alice Sebold
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. There was one thing my murderer didn't understand; he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.
Alice Sebold
#24. 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
#25. Try to breathe, he said, and for the first time the only thought in my head after an instruction like that wasn't Fuck you.
I breathed.
Alice Sebold
#26. As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.
Alice Sebold
#27. 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
#29. 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
#30. Ll you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why, it will come.
Alice Sebold
#31. Exactly,' she said, and made her point as simply as that. There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven.
~pg 8
Alice Sebold
#32. 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
#33. If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling, you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth.
Alice Sebold
#34. 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
#35. She was in the downstairs bathroom sneaking bites from the macaroons my father's firm always sent us for Christmas. She ate them greedily they were like suns bursting open in her mouth.
Alice Sebold
#36. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are.
Alice Sebold
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. As if in the other side of his kiss there could ve a new life
Alice Sebold
#42. Our heartache poured into one another like water from cup to cup.
Alice Sebold
#43. 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
#44. When they reached the lobby and the doors opened I knew they were meant to be there, the four of them, alone.
Alice Sebold
#45. Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?
Alice Sebold
#46. Finally, I thought, I had reached the future that was no future.
Alice Sebold
#47. One day, Buckley came home from the second grade with a story he'd written: Once upon a time there was a kid named Billy. He liked to explore. He saw a hole and went inside but he never came out. The End.
Alice Sebold
#48. How to Commit the Perfect Murder was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.
Alice Sebold
#49. When she saw a strange man whom she didn't trust, she did an immediate breakdown in her mind. It was quicker - honoring the pragmatics of fear - than pretending she shouldn't think this way.
Alice Sebold
#50. Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.
Alice Sebold
#51. I never let myself yearn for Buckley, afraid he might see my image in a mirror or a bottle cap. Like everyone else I was trying to protect him.
Alice Sebold
#52. As she brought prospective buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag.
Alice Sebold
#53. 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
#54. I fell in love with you again; While you were away - Jack Salmon
Alice Sebold
#55. Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go
Alice Sebold
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. He wore his own innocence like a comfortable old coat.
Alice Sebold
#59. I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind of rebel. Helpless, really.
Alice Sebold
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#65. How can I be expected to be trapped for the rest of my life by a man frozen in time?
Alice Sebold
#66. She didn't even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house
it was the eyes, her dancer's carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.
Alice Sebold
#67. A father's suspicion...' she began.
Is as powerful as a mother's intuition.'
~pg 87, Ruana Singh and Jack Salmon
Alice Sebold
#68. But I had made contact with a different planet from the one my parents or sister lived on. It was a planet where an act of violence changed your life.
Alice Sebold
#69. I don't think ignorance is a way that you gain distance on something.
Alice Sebold
#70. I find talking about my work harder than it might be if honesty wasn't my calling card.
Alice Sebold
#71. Like a medical procedure,' Ruth said. 'Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet.
Alice Sebold
#72. 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
#73. If you chose to go into someone else's reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.
Alice Sebold
#74. I tried to take solace in Holiday, our dog. I missed him in a way I hadn't yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound silly but I didn't believe it, would not believe it.
Alice Sebold
#75. I'm fine with whatever comes my way, and whatever doesn't come my way I'm fine with too. I have a very laissez-faire attitude with the whole thing.
Alice Sebold
#76. 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
#77. I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand
Alice Sebold
#78. I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found how to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.
Alice Sebold
#79. He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.
Alice Sebold
#80. I have never been shy about listening to the input of others and weighing it seriously.
Alice Sebold
#81. I went to church irregularly and was mostly reading comics in the pew.
Alice Sebold
#83. What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant
gone.
Alice Sebold
#84. In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this story by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky.
Alice Sebold
#85. I forgive you, I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.
Alice Sebold
#86. You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any other girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate.
Alice Sebold
#87. I was unable to recognize something that I would come up against time and time again. You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate. So how could I be both..?
Alice Sebold
#89. I wake up very early in the morning. I like to start in the dark, and I never work at night, because my brain is evaporated by 4 P.M.
Alice Sebold
#90. She could shut out the whole world, including herself.
Alice Sebold
#91. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish.
Alice Sebold
#93. 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
#94. Father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o'clock. Until the day in the yard with my
Alice Sebold
#95. Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly.
Alice Sebold
#96. I wanted to be the moron of the family, because morons seemed to have more fun, more freedom and more personality.
Alice Sebold
#97. 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
#99. He had to seek out her eyes. They weren't focusing on him. They seemed to be preoccupied, and he wished he could reach up and grab them and train them on here and now. On him.
Alice Sebold
#100. I missed her then but it was an odd sort of missing because by then, I knew the meaning of forever.
Alice Sebold
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
