Sebold Quotes & Sayings

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

My name was Salmon like the fish, first name Susie. — Alice Sebold

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

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. — 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

It's something that I know how to do because I taught for a very long time, so I can do it, and I feel a responsibility to do it - for instance, in this situation, where I'm touring specifically for this period of time. But most writers are not public people. There are a few writers out there who really enjoy it and are good at it, and can both work and do that at the same time, but I'm not one of those people. — Alice Sebold

You save yourself or you remain unsaved. — 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

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

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

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

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

Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult. — Alice Sebold

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.

~pg 29, Susie's sister Lindsey dealing with grief. — 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

Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak. — Alice Sebold

I mean, if I went into my closet, I could find a previous draft and try to figure that out, but it takes a long time for me to find the voice to tell a story in. I was working from other points of view for a couple years there. — Alice Sebold

I wanted to be a novelist for so long. — 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

A lot of people ask questions that they don't want to answer themselves, and if we're honest about the intimacy that we have with our parents, you wish them the best and you wish them the worst more than anybody else in the world. I think everyone has had a moment in their life where they wished a parent ill, and I think it's perhaps a very romantic idea that that doesn't happen. — Alice Sebold

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

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

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

Sometimes cats fall ten flights out of the windows of highrises and land on their feet. You only believe it because you've seen it in print. — 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 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

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

I now think that was distanced me from Tricia and from the Rape Crisis Center was their use of generalities. I did not want to be one of a group or compared with others. It somehow blindsided my sense that I was going to survive. Tricia prepared me for failure by saying that it would be okay if I failed. She did this by showing me that the odds out there were against me. But what she told me, I didn't want to hear. In the face of dismal statistics regarding arrest, prosecution, and even full recovery for the victim, I saw no choice but to ignore the statistics. I needed what gave me hope, like being assigned a female assistant district attorney, not the news that the number of rape prosecutions in Syracuse for that calendar year had been nil. — Alice Sebold

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

Books and novels in particular that grapple with quite a few things are difficult to explain, so I think that first line can come in a substitute for trying to form a longer sense of what the book is about. — 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 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

It was Buckley, as my father and sister joined the group and listened to Grandma Lynn's countless toasts, who saw me. He saw me standing under the rustic colonial clock and stared. He was drinking champagne. There were strings coming out from all around me, reaching out, waving in the air. Someone passed him a brownie. He held it in his hand but did not eat. He saw my shape and face, which had not changed-the hair still parted down the middle, the chest still flat and hips undeveloped-and wanted to call out my name. It was only a moment, and then I was gone. — 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

Oh sweetheart, do you really think if you
seal it up, that the pain's gonna go away? — Alice Sebold

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

Everything in her wanted to run -fly back to California, back to her quiet existence working among strangers. Hiding out in the folds of tree trunks and tropical petals, tucked away safely among so many foreign plants and people. — Alice Sebold

I forgive you, I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death. — Alice Sebold

Last night it had been my father who had finally said it: "She's never coming home." A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it. — Alice Sebold

For Lorenz, virgins were not a part of his world. He was skeptical of many things I said. Later, when the serology reports proved that what I had said was not a lie, that I had been a virgin, and that I was telling the truth, he could not respect me enough. I think he felt responsible, somehow. It was, after all, in his world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime. — Alice Sebold

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

Our heartache poured into one another like water from cup to cup. — Alice Sebold

All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why
really know
it will come. — Alice Sebold

Do you ever think of her?' she asked.
They were quiet again.
All the time,' Ruth said. A chill ran down my spine. 'Sometimes I think she's lucky, you know. I hate this place.'
Me too,' Ray said. 'But I've lived other places. This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one.'
You're not implying...'
She's in heaven, if you believe in that stuff.'
You don't?'
I don't think so, no.'
I do,' Ruth said. 'I don't mean la-la angel wing crap, but I do think there's a heaven.'
Is she happy?'
It is heaven, right?'
But what does that mean?'
The tea was stone-cold and the first bell had already rung. Ruth smiled into her cup. 'Well, as my dad would say, it means she's out of this shithole.'

~pgs 82-83 — Alice Sebold

In my 20s, I railed against anything 'spiritual'; I thought it was all crap. — Alice Sebold

On my way home from the junior high, I would sometimes stop at the edge of our property and watch my mother ride the ride-on mower, looping in and out among the pine trees, and I could remember then how she used to whistle in the mornings as she made her tea and how my father, rushing home on Thursdays, would bring her marigolds and her face would light up in yellowy in delight. They had been deeply, separately, wholly in love- apart from her children my mother could reclaim this love, but with them she began to drift. It was my father who grew toward us as the years went by; it was my mother who grew away.

~pg 153; love — Alice Sebold

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

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

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

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

I was not in the bathroom, in the tub, or in the spigot; I did not hold court in the mirror above her head or stand in miniature at the tip of every bristle on Lindsey's or Buckley's toothbrush. In some way I could not account for- had they reached a state of bliss? were my parents back together forever? had Buckley begun to tell someone his troubles? would my father's heart truly heal?- I was done yearning for them, needing them to yearn for me. Though I still would. Though they still would. Always. — Alice Sebold

I think understanding is the way to gain perspective - and therefore can live among those hideous realities. You can live with them. — 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

Finally, I thought, I had reached the future that was no future. — Alice Sebold

In this deeply nuanced portrait of an American family, Bret Anthony Johnston fearlessly explores the truth behind a mythic happy ending. In Remember Me Like This, Johnston presents an incisive dismantling of an all-too-comforting fallacy: that in being found we are no longer lost. — Alice Sebold

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

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. — Alice Sebold

I would do what I did best, I thought. I would wait. It was only a matter of time, after all. — Alice Sebold

I explained myself like this: I did not feel adamant about saying no, but I also didn't feel adamant about saying yes, so until I felt strongly one way or another, I'd stick with no. — 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

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

I had wondered if all mothers shared a fear of how vibrant and alive their children were. — Alice Sebold

The sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. "I think she listens," she said, too softly to be heard. — 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

Judging Natalie as my mother had judged me was, I felt like telling her son, just my ass-backward way of showing love. I'd spent my life trying to translate that language, and now I realized I had come to speak it fluently. When was it that you realized the thread woven through your DNA carried the relationship deformities of your blood relatives as much as it did their diabetes and bone density? — 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

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

Lindsey took my father's hand and watched his face for movement. My sister was growing up before my eyes. I listened as she whispered the words he had sung to the two of us before Buckley was born:

Stones and bones;
snow and frost
seeds and beansand polliwogs.
Paths and twigs, assorted kisses,
We all who knowwho Daddy misses!
His two little frogs of girls, that's who.
They know where they are, do you, do you?


When her eyes closed and they both slept silently together, I whispered to them:
Stones and bones;
snow and frost;
seeds and beans and polliwogs.
Paths and twigs, assorted kisses,
We all know who Susie misses..... — Alice Sebold

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

When he felt his heart hurt he turned into something stronger than a little boy, and he grew up this way. A heart that flashed from heart to stone, heart to stone. — 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

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

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

Years passed. The trees in our yard grew taller. I watched my family and my friends and neighbors, the teachers whom I'd had or imaged having, the high school I had dreamed about. As I sat in the gazebo I would pretend instead that I was sitting on the topmost branch of the maple under which my brother had swallowed a stick and still played hide-and-seek with Nate, or I would perch on the railing of a stairwell in New York and wait for Ruth to pass near. I would study with Ray. Drive the Pacific Coast Highway on a warm afternoon of salty air with my mother. But I would end each day with my father in his den.
I would lay these photographs down in my mind, those gathered from my constant watching, and I could trace how one thing- my death- connected these images to a single source. No one could have predicted how my loss would change small moments on Earth. But I held on to those moments, hoarded them. None of them were lost as long as I was there. — Alice Sebold

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

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

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

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

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

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

I knew my mother's limitations because they formed the marrow of my bones. — Alice Sebold

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

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

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.

~pg 17 — Alice Sebold

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

I fell in love with you again; While you were away - Jack Salmon — Alice Sebold

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

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

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

I left my mark on that man. — Alice Sebold

That I wanted more. That night I dreamed of kissing her again and wondered if she was thinking the same thing. — Alice Sebold