Quotes from Alice Sebold

In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are.

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.

The air inside the station wagon was cold and fragile. I could see the moist air when he exhaled, and this made me want to palpate my own stony lungs.

this cold woman who was not exactly cold, this rock who was not stone.

Esos eran los queridos huesos que habían crecido en mi ausencia, las conexiones a veces tenues y a veces hechas con grandes sacrificios, pero a menudo magníficas que habían nacido después de mi desaparición y empecé a ver las cosas de una manera que permitía abrazar al mundo sin estar en él.

Je?eli dadz? ci papier w linie, pisz w poprzek.

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

She held on to two sides of an hourglass and wondered how this could be possible. The time she'd had alone had been gravitationally circumscribed by when her attachments would pull her back. And they had pulled now – doublefisted.

This wide wide Heaven is about flathead nails and the soft down of new leaves, wide roller coaster rides and escaped marbles that fall then hang then take you somewhere you could never have imagined in your small-heaven dreams.

Christmas was largely ignored in my heaven. Some people dressed all in white and pretended they were snowflakes, but other than that, nothing.

I felt like observing my way out of there, but I didn't.

I was raised by a solitary woman to be a solitary child, and that was, I now saw, what I had hopelessly become.

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 is had needed it.

Ruth did not believe in makeup. She thought it demeaned women.

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

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.

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.

My mother's desire to reach those waves, touch her feet to another ocean on the other side of the country, was all she was thinking of--the pure baptismal goal of it. Whoosh and you can start all over again. Or was life more like the horrible game in gym that has you running from one side of an enclosed space to another, picking up and setting down wooden blocks without end?

In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.

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.

Buckley kept the shoe on his dresser, until one day it wasn't there anymore and no amount of looking for it could turn it up.

I wish now that I had known this was weird.

He walked in the room like a ghost and like a ghost slipped in between the sheets, barely creasing them. He was not unkind in the ways that the television and newspapers were full of. His cruelty was in his absence. Even when he came and sat at her dinner table and ate her food, he was not there.

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