Alice Sebold Quotes (69 Quotes)

As if in the other side of his kiss there could ve a new life.

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.

My grandmother stepped back into the kitchen to get their drinks. I had come to love her more after death than I ever had on Earth. I wish I could say that in that moment in the kitchen she decided to quit drinking, but I now saw that drinking was a part of what made her who she was. If the worst of what she left on Earth was a legacy of inebriated support, it was a good legacy in my book.

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.

As she brought prospective buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag.

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.

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.

Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go.

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.

I loved the way the burned-out flashcubes of the Kodak Instamatic marked a moment that had passed, one that would now be gone forever except for a picture.

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.

There was one thing my murderer didn't understand; he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.

At nearly two months,the idea of it as news was fading in the hearts of all but my family-and Ruth

I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines.

Once released from life, having lost it in such violence, I couldn't calculate my steps. I didn't have time for contemplation. In violence it is the getting out that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from the shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping to land away from where you are.

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.

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.

I was in the air around him. I was in the cold mornings he had now. I was in the quiet time he spent alone. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free.

Our only kiss was like an accident -- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.

There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven.

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.

I was like I was in science class: I was curious.

Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.

There's no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.

But also I wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was granted one weak grace. Back in the room where the green chair was still warm from his body, I blew that lonely, flickering candle out.

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.

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.

This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one

But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone.

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.

She had a stare that stretched to infinity. She was, in that moment, not my mother but something separate from me.

Well, as my dad would say, it means she's out of this shithole.

Everyday he got up. Before sleep wore off, he was who he used to be. Then, as his consciousness woke, it was as if poison seeped in. At first he couldn't even get up. He lay there under a heavy weight. But then only movment could save him, and he moved and he moved and he moved, no movement being enough to make up for it. The guilt on him, the hand of God pressing down on him, saying, You were not there when your daughter needed you.

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.

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.

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

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.

I wish you all a long and happy life.

She sat in her room on the couch my parents had given up on and worked on hardening herself. 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 can see.

When Lindsey and I played Barbies Barbie and Ken got married at sixteen. To us there was only one true love in everyone's life we have no concept of compromise or retries.

He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.

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.

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.

When they reached the lobby and the doors opened I knew they were meant to be there, the four of them, alone.

About Grandma Lynn: She was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. At seventy, she had come to believe in time alone.

He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.

Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.

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.

You don't notice the dead leaving when they really hoose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down.

After a few days in heaven, I realized that the javelin-throwers and the shot-putters and the boys who played basketball on the cracked blacktop were all in their own version of heaven. Theirs just fit with mine- didn't duplicate it precisely, but had a lot of the same things going on inside.