Quotes from 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 needed it.

She was hollow and lost and abandoned up.

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

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.

My father dreamed that one day he might teach another child to love ships in bottles. He knew there would be both sadness and joy in it; that it would always hold an echo of me.

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

The fine wall of leaden crystal that had protected her heart - somehow numbed her into disbelief - shattered.

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

Fucking bastards are simple by nature.

Kuinka tehdään täydellinen murha oli taivaassa vanha leikki. Minä valitsin aina aseeksi jääpuikon: se sulaa olemattomiin.

Soon she noted that teachers in subjects besides gym didn't report her if she cut. They were happy not to have her there: her intelligence made her a problem. It demanded attention and rushed their lesson plans forward.

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.

Horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.

She likes a quiet life, has few close friends, and makes new ones slowly. ...'I want to work on my next book... and try to be here to garden a little in the fall, and read. I'm married to the man I want to be married to, live in a certain way that I like living. It's very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.

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.

These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors

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

When the dead are done with the living," Franny said to me, "the living can go on to other things.

Because horror on Earth is real and it is everyday. It is like a flower or the sun; it cannot be contained.

They were all things she would not give away in New York, where she watched others tell their drunken bar stories, prostituting their families and their trauma for popularity and booze. These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors.

Ruth, que quería que todos creyeran lo que ella sabía: que los muertos realmente nos hablan, que, en el aire que rodea a los vivos, los espíritus se mueven, se entremezclan y ríen con nosotros. Son el oxígeno que respiramos.

People grow up by living. I want to live.

y vi, mientras Samuel daba el atrevido paso de besar a Lindsey delante de toda la familia, que emprendían por fin el vuelo, alejándose de mi muerte.

As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of the things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.