Alice Sebold famous quotes

Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.
-- Alice Sebold

#Heaven #Growth #Comfort

You save yourself or you remain unsaved.
-- Alice Sebold

#Save Yourself

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

#Beautiful #Girl #Hate

I like gardening - it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.
-- Alice Sebold

#Garden #Gardening #Needs

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

#Mother #Night #Gowns

Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.
-- Alice Sebold

#Inspiring #Dream #Destiny

Your first kiss is destiny knocking.
-- Alice Sebold

#Kissing #Destiny #First Kiss

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

#Pain #Real #Flower

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

#Firsts #Conformity #Weirdness

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

#Way #Cameras #Moments

There’s no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.
-- Alice Sebold

#War #States

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

#Children #Father #Murderer

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

#Life #Real #Flower

Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?
-- Alice Sebold

#Long

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.
-- Alice Sebold

#Lovely #Gone #World

How to Commit the Perfect Murder" was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.
-- Alice Sebold

#Games #Perfect #Heaven

Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world.
-- Alice Sebold

#Father #Nice #Fall

Nothing is ever certain.
-- Alice Sebold

#Death #Certain

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

#Hair #Black #Promise

Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.
-- Alice Sebold

#Yesterday #Life Is

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.
-- Alice Sebold

#Forever #Gone #Way

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

#Girl #Art #Feet

Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.
-- Alice Sebold

#Men #Monsters #Murderer

Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort. So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish.
-- Alice Sebold

#Quilts #Humble #Hands

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

#Girl #Kissing #Two

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

#Children #Two #Clarity

And in a small house five miles away was a man who held my mud-encrusted charm bracelet out to his wife. Look what I found at the old industrial park," he said. "A construction guy said they were bulldozing the whole lot. They're afraid of sink holes like that one that swallowed the cars." His wife poured him some water from the sink as he fingered the tiny bike and the ballet shoe, the flower basket and the thimble. He held out the muddy bracelet as she set down his glass. This little girl's grown up by now," she said. Almost. Not quite. I wish you all a long and happy life.
-- Alice Sebold

#Girl #Flower #Happy Life

The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.
-- Alice Sebold

#Ignorant #Layers #Time And Change

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

#Party #Honor #Favors

Ruth hadn't talked to my sister since before my death, and then it was only to excuse herself in the hallway at school. But she'd seen Lindsey walking home with Samuel and seen her smile with him. She watched as my sister said yes to pancakes and no to everything else. She had tried to imagine herself being my sister as she had spent time imagining being me.
-- Alice Sebold

#Home #School #Ruth

Hold still," my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.
-- Alice Sebold

#Father #Blue #Sea

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

#Father #Heart #Doors

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

#Broken #Touching #Together

He took the hat from my mouth. ''Tell me you love me'', he said. Gently I did. The end came anyway
-- Alice Sebold

#Mouths #Hats #Lovely Bones

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

#Girl #Kissing #Looks

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.
-- Alice Sebold

#Swings #Land #Rope

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

#World #Safe #Assumption

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

#Rocks #Stones #Cold

I missed her then but it was an odd sort of missing because by then, I knew the meaning of forever.
-- Alice Sebold

#Missing Someone #Forever #Missing

I had always been in love with him. I counted the lashes of each closed eye. He had been my almost, my might have been, and I did not want to leave him
-- Alice Sebold

#Eye #Happy Love #Want

Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.
-- Alice Sebold

#Pain #Stories #Lost

One thing about failing repeatedly: If you're still doing it after you've failed that much, you really mean it.
-- Alice Sebold

#Mean #Failing #Really Mean

I dont think ignorance is a way that you gain distance on something.
-- Alice Sebold

#Distance #Ignorance #Thinking

I wanted to be the moron of the family, because morons seemed to have more fun, more freedom and more personality.
-- Alice Sebold

#Fun #Personality #Moron

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 isnt about couches and milk shakes and never having a troubling thought again.
-- Alice Sebold

#Growing Up #Thinking #Evil

I have never been shy about listening to the input of others and weighing it seriously.
-- Alice Sebold

#Listening #Shy #Input

The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy - the words on the page being sent back and forth from engaged editor to open author - is unique in my experience.
-- Alice Sebold

#Unique #Editors #Use

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

#People #Want #Weirdness

I was trying to prove to them and to myself that I was still who I had always been. I was beautiful, if fat. I was smart, if loud. I was good, if ruined.
-- Alice Sebold

#Beautiful #Smart #Trying

Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions
-- Alice Sebold

#Medicine #Different #Poison

Every day a question mark.
-- Alice Sebold

#Mark #Question Mark

But I know I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead — in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in 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 navigating the unknown.
-- Alice Sebold

#Falling In Love #Taken #Dark

I was like I was in science class: I was curious.
-- Alice Sebold

#Class #Curious

Like snowflakes,' Franny said,'none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before
-- Alice Sebold

#Snowflake #Said

How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home?
-- Alice Sebold

#Home #Secret

People grow up by living.
-- Alice Sebold

#Growing Up #People #Grows

You're not supposed to look back, you're supposed to keep going.
-- Alice Sebold

#Looks #Keep Going

I wish you all a long and happy life
-- Alice Sebold

#Happy Life #Long #Wish

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

#World #Imagine #Imagine That

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

#Children #Two #Three

I think you only learn what kind of personality you have by committing to things.
-- Alice Sebold

#Thinking #Personality #Kind

And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.
-- Alice Sebold

#Memories #Were Meant To Be #My Sister