Quotes from Alice Sebold

It was not so much, she would write in her journal, that she wanted to have sex with women, but that she wanted to disappear inside of them forever. To hide.

Take deep breaths and hold them. Try to stay still for longer and longer periods of time. Make yourself small and like a stone. Curl the edges of yourself up and fold them under where no one else can see.

There is no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.

His cruelty was in his absence.

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.

She had a stare that stretched to infinity.

It was ugly and precious all at once.

Oh sweetheart, do you really think if you seal it up, that the pain's gonna go away?

If I was aware I would have to tie laces I would not have been able to put my feet into socks.

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 that 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.

How can I be expected to be trapped for the rest of my life by a man frozen in time?

I knew gloves meant you were an adult and mittens meant you weren't.

she watched others tell their drunken bar stories, prostituting their families and their traumas for popularity and booze.

I have never liked the phone. Ten years ago, during a misguided fit of self-improvement, I pasted smiley-faced stickers on the phone in my bedroom and on the one in the kitchen. Then I typed out two labels and taped them to the handsets. "It's an opportunity, not an attack," they read.

How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it a secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home? She had put billboards and roads between them, throwing roadblocks behind her and ripping off the rearview mirror, and thought that would make him disappear?

This little girl's grown up by now, she said. Almost. Not quite. I wish you all a long and happy life.

He had to seek out her eyes. They weren't focusing on him. They seemed to be preoccupied, and he wished he could reach up and grab them and train them on here and now. On him.

She listened for the pain in my words, not to the narrative itself. She was intuiting what it meant to me, what was most important, what, in that confused mass of experience and yearning she heard in my voice, she could single out to give back.

I never let myself yearn for Buckley, afraid he might see my image in a mirror or a bottle cap. Like everyone else I was trying to protect him.

between a man and a woman there was always one person who was stronger than the other one. That doesn't mean the weaker one doesn't love the stronger one, she'd pleaded...for my mother what mattered was that as she spoke, she had suddenly identified herself as the weaker one. This revalation sent her reeling. What had she thought all those years but the opposite?

Nikt nie mo?e wyratowa? drugiego cz?owieka. Ka?dy musi ratowa? si? sam albo jest stracony.

Pero esperaba con paciencia. Ya no creía en el poder de la palabra. Nunca salvaba nada. A los setenta años había acabado creyendo únicamente en el tiempo.

I feel like I'm standing in the wake of a volcano erruption.

Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult.