Quotes from Alice Sebold

I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand

No one can pull anyone back from anywhere. You save yourself or you remain unsaved.

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.

Your first kiss is destiny knocking.

When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things," Franny said. "What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?

Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.

What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.

And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.

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

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.

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.

I have never been shy about listening to the input of others and weighing it seriously.

I always had that sense of being censored for the things that I thought. Why is it wrong to embroider your pants, or paint with acrylics on your clothing? Why is that weird? Isn't it weirder to want to be like everyone else?

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.

She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was.

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

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

I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.

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

Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort. 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. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish.

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'.

The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see a figure standing at the end of thier bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus.

The living deserve attention, too

Hey, Ocean Eyes," my father said. "Where'd you go on us?