Quotes from Alice Sebold

He had 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.

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.

We are all prisoners but some of us are in cells with windows and some without.

All of them are gone except for me.. And for me.. Nothing is gone.

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.

ll you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why, it will come.

For me the saddest thing was that these animals smelled the brokenness in him – the human defect – and kept away.

The moon is whole all the time, but we can't always see it. What we see is an almost moon or a 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.

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.

When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.

Like snowflakes, none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before.

There were also the Masters of Arcane Knowledge. Everyone begrudged their presence among the gifteds. These were the kids that could break down an engine and build it back again - no diagrams or instructions needed. They understood things in a real, not theoretical, way. They seemed not to care about their grades.

Had my brother really seen me somehow, or was he merely a boy telling beautiful lies?

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.

It was in these moments, I knew, that my father loved my mother most. When my mother was broken and helpless, when her hard shell was stripped away and her spite and brittleness couldn't serve her. It was a sad dance of two people who were starving to death in each other's arms. Their marriage an X that forever joined murderer to victim.

You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out. Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room.

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie.

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

So much in life is about almosts, not quites.

Like someone who has survived a gun-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a scar for eight long years.

There are secret rooms inside us," I had said to my therapist. "A relatively benign construct," he said, and so I did not bother with the rest of it. That in my house we never left them, that in my house my mother and father preferred them to everywhere else.

I wish you all a long and happy life

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.

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.