Alice Sebold Quotes & Sayings

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

At Eversong, there were all sorts of dogs. And some of them, the ones I liked best, would lift their heads when they smelled an interesting scent in the air. If it was vivid enough, if they couldn't identify it immediately, or it, as the case may be, they knew exactly what it was- their brains going, 'Um steak tartare'- they'd track it until they came to the object itself. In the face of th real article, the true story, they decided then waht to do. That's how they operated. They didn't shut down their desire to know just because the smell was bad or the object was dangerous. They hunted. So did I. — Alice Sebold

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

She wasn't much of a talker when there was nothing to say. — Alice Sebold

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. — Alice Sebold

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

You save yourself or you remain unsaved. — Alice Sebold

I wasn't lost, or frozen, or gone ... I was alive; I was alive in my own perfect world. — Alice Sebold

It's hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you're ultimately the author, so you do have control. — Alice Sebold

I had been kissed once by someone I liked. His name was Ray and he was Indian. He had an accent and was dark. I wasn't supposed to like him. Clarissa called his large eyes, with their half closed lids, "freak-a-delic," but he was nice and smart and helped me cheat on my algebra exam while pretending he hadn't. He kissed me by my locker the day before we turned in our photos for the yearbook. When the yearbook came out at the end of the summer, I saw that under his picture he had answered the standard "My heart belongs to" with "Susie Salmon." I guess he had had plans. I remember his lips were chapped. — Alice Sebold

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

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

My life was over; my life had just begun. — Alice Sebold

Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish. — Alice Sebold

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

Placing blame was easier than adding up the mounting figures of what he'd lost. — Alice Sebold

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

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

If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time. — Alice Sebold

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

The moon is whole all the time, but we can't always see it. What we see is an almost moon or not-quite moon. The rest is hiding just out of view, but there's only one moon, so we follow it in the sky. We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides. — Alice Sebold

greatest hope. Last night it had been my father who'd — Alice Sebold

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

I couldn't help but think, as I watched him, of the barrels of toxic fluids that had accrued behind Hal's bike shop where the scrub lining the railroad tracks had offered local companies enough cover to dump a stray contaner or two. Everything had been sealed up, but things were beginning to leak out. I had come to both pity and respect Len in the years since my mother left. He followed the physical to try to understand things that were impossible to comphrehend. In that, I could see, he was like me. — Alice Sebold

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

To transform experience and thought into language and narrative - that is beautiful even if that beauty is in brokenness. — Alice Sebold

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

We stood
the dead child and the living
on either side of my father, both wanting the same thing. To have him to ourselves forever. To please us both was an impossibility. — Alice Sebold

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

We have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things. So it made sense to me to reflect the human condition that not every action has an explanation. We act, and then later maybe come to an understanding about it, or maybe not. — Alice Sebold

His love for my mother wasn't about looking back and loving something that would never change. It was about loving my mother for everything
for her brokenness and her fleeing, for her being there right then in that moment before the sun rose and the hospital staff came in. It was about touching that hair with the side of his fingertip, and knowing yet plumbing fearlessly the depths of her ocean eyes. — Alice Sebold

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

When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living - to learn to accept? — Alice Sebold

This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one — Alice Sebold

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

So much in life is about almosts, not quites. — Alice Sebold

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

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

I'm just a friendly bystander who they occasionally ask questions of. That's my level of involvement. — Alice Sebold

A father's suspicion...' she began.
Is as powerful as a mother's intuition.'


~pg 87, Ruana Singh and Jack Salmon — Alice Sebold

I went to church irregularly and was mostly reading comics in the pew. — Alice Sebold

At Evensong one night, while Holly played at sax and Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer joined in, I saw him: Holiday, racing past a fluffy white Samoyed. He had lived to a ripe old age on earth and slept at my father's feet after my mother left, never wanting to let him out of his sight ... I waited for him to sniff me out, anxious to know if here, on the other side, I would still be the little girl he slept beside. I did not have to wait long: he was so happy to see me, he knocked me down. — Alice Sebold

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

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

My father was too distracted to see anything in this. Mimicking my mother, he taped it to the fridge in the same place Buckley's long-forgotten drawing of the Inbetween had been. But my brother knew something was wrong with his story. Knew it by how his teacher reacted, doing a double take like they did in his comic books. He took the story down and brought it to my old room while Grandma Lynn was downstairs. He folded it into a tiny square and put it inside the now-empty insides of my four poster bed.

~pgs 217-218; Buckley's childhood — Alice Sebold

I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't. — Alice Sebold

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

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

In the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway — Alice Sebold

If you chose to go into someone else's reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts. — Alice Sebold

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

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

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

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

He hadn't woken a day since my death when the day wasn't something to get through. But the truth was, the memorial service day was not the worst kind. At least it was honest. At least it was a day shaped around what they were so preoccupied by: my absence. Today he would not have to pretend he was getting back to normal - whatever normal was. — Alice Sebold

Since their first kiss in our kitchen two weeks after my death, I had known that he was - as my sister and I had giggled with our Barbies or while watching Bobby Sherman on TV - her one and only. Samuel had pressed himself into her need and the cement between the two of them had begun to set immediately. They had gone to Temple together, side by side. He had hated it and she had pushed him through. She had loved it and this had allowed him to survive. — Alice Sebold

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

Almost everyone in heaven has someone on Earth they watch, a loved one, a friend or even a stranger who was once kind, who offered warm food or a bright smile when one of us had needed it. And when I wasn't watching I could hear the others talking to those they loved on Earth: just as fruitlessly as me, I'm afraid. A one-sided card cajoling and coaching of the young, a one way loving and desiring of their mates, a single-sided card that could never get signed. — Alice Sebold

In the drawing a thick blue line separated the air and ground. In the days that followed I watched my family walk back and forth past that drawing and I became convinced that the thick blue line was a real place - an Inbetween, where heaven's horizon met Earth's. I wanted to go there into the cornflower blue of Crayola, the royal, the turquoise, the sky. — Alice Sebold

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

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

I don't do much public speaking. I did a lot of stuff for Bones, and then ended up having said yes to a lot of things that kept me on the road for a while for that, but then I pretty much stopped. I'm touring for this book, but when the tour is done, that'll be the end of it. — Alice Sebold

She was hollow and lost and abandoned up. — Alice Sebold

How can I be expected to be trapped for the rest of my life by a man frozen in time? — Alice Sebold

I had begun to chase my husband as I had once chased my mother, toe to toe, a shadow girl trying to be what I thought they wanted me to be. I — Alice Sebold

Fucking bastards are simple by nature. — Alice Sebold

As he wrote, the candle in the window kept flickering, and despite his desk lamp the flickering distracted him. He sat back in the old wooden school chair he'd had since college and heard the reassuring squeak of the wood under him. At the firm he was failing to even register what was needed of him. Daily now he faced column after of column of meaningless numbers he was supposed to make square with company claims. He was making mistakes with a frequency that was frightening, and he feared, more than he had in the first days following my disappearance, that he would not be able to support his remaining children.

~pgs 135-136; Susie's father on death — Alice Sebold

People grow up by living. — Alice Sebold

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

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

I left my mark on that man. — Alice Sebold

Like a medical procedure,' Ruth said. 'Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet. — Alice Sebold

Lindsey and I would lie down on the floor underneath it. I would pretend to be the knight that was pictured, and Holiday was the faithful dog curled up at his feet. Lindsey would be the wife he'd left behind. It always dissolved into giggles no matter how solemn the start. Lindsey would tell the dead knight that a wife had to move on, that she couldn't be trapped for the rest of her life by a man who was frozen in time ...
"You're dead, knight," she would say. "Time to move on. — Alice Sebold

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her brain was a storm, her usual insight gone. — Alice Sebold

Your first kiss is destiny knocking. — Alice Sebold

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

She could shut out the whole world, including herself. — Alice Sebold

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

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

As I watched my family sip champagne, I thought about how their lives trailed backward and forward from my death and then, I saw, as Samuel took the daring step of kissing Lindsey in a room full of family, became borne aloft away from it.
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections- 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.
My father looked at the daughter who was standing there in front of him. The shadow daughter was gone. — Alice Sebold

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

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

The stains could be seen only in the sunlight, so Ruth was never really aware of them until later, when she would stop at an outdoor cafe for a cup of coffee, and look down at her skirt and see the dark traces of spilled vodka or whiskey. The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: 'booze affects material as it does people'. — Alice Sebold

I find talking about my work harder than it might be if honesty wasn't my calling card. — Alice Sebold

Only by thinking I had freedom had I come to understand how imprisoned I was. — Alice Sebold

I was here for a moment, and then I was gone. I wish you all a long and happy life. — Alice Sebold

For three nights he hadn't known how to touch my mother or what to say. 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 the stronger one's strength. And they had never understood, as they did now, what the word horror meant.

~pgs 20-21 — Alice Sebold

Every day a question mark. — Alice Sebold

The living room seemed to be where no living ever actually occurred. — Alice Sebold

My mother gave Lindsey a meaningful look. 'We are not discussing this further. You can go up to your room and wait or wait with me. Your choice.'
Lindsey was dumbfounded. She stared at our mother and knew what she wanted most: to flee, to run out into the cornfield where my father was, where I was, where she felt suddenly that the heart of her family had moved. But Buckley wtood warm against her.

~pg 143; Lindsey, Buckley and Mom — Alice Sebold

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

By the time I was eighteen, she had sat me down and detailed her alcoholism, its onset and aftermath. She believed that by sharing such things I might be able to avoid them or, if need be, recognize them when they occurred. By talking about them to her children, she was also acknowledging that they were real and that they had an effect on us too, that things like this shaped a family, not just the person they happened to. — Alice Sebold

Your sordid life is your sordid life. You shouldn't live it if you don't like it. — Alice Sebold

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