Alice Sebold Quotes

You save yourself or you remain unsaved.

Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.

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

You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any other girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate.

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

Your first kiss is destiny knocking.

Since then I've always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse; rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.

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 was trying to prove to them and to myself that I was still who I had always been. I was beautiful, if fat. I was smart, if loud. I was good, if ruined.

Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.

Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.

Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.

If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.

Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?

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

How to Commit the Perfect Murder" was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.

Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.

To transform experience and thought into language and narrative - that is beautiful even if that beauty is in brokenness.

We have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things. So it made sense to me to reflect the human condition that not every action has an explanation. We act, and then later maybe come to an understanding about it, or maybe not.

Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly.

Nothing is ever certain.

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.

I knew something as I watched: almost everyone was saying goodbye to me. I was becoming one of the many little-girl-losts. They would go back to their homes and put me to rest, a letter from the past never to be reopened or reread. And I could say goodbye to them, wish them well, bless them somehow for their good thoughts. A handshake in the street, a dropped item picked up and retrieved and handed back, or a friendly wave from the distant window, a nod, a smile, a moment when the eyes lock over the antics of a child.

I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines.