Quotes from Alice Sebold

The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was away . But when people left they always came back.

As she brought prospective buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag.

I wish you all a long and happy life

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.

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.

Every day a question mark.

Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions

How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home?

At fourteen my sister sailed away from me into a place I'd never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.

Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.

After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury hurled directly at me for reasons I remain unsure of.

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 had needed it. And when I wasn't watching I could hear the others talking to those they loved on Earth: just as fruitlessly as me, I'm afraid. A one-sided card cajoling and coaching of the young, a one way loving and desiring of their mates, a single-sided card that could never get signed.

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

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

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.

Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow from the stronger one's strength.

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.

He took the hat from my mouth. ''Tell me you love me'', he said. Gently I did. The end came anyway

I would like to tell you that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe.

What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child

The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.

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.

In the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway

He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.