Alice Sebold Quotes (69 Quotes)

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.