Alice Sebold Quotes

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

“You look invincible,' my mother said one night.
I loved these times, when we seemed to feel the same thing. I turned to her, wrapped in my thin gown, and said:
I am.”

“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.”

“Your first kiss is destiny knocking.”

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

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

“She liked to imagine that when she passed, the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was. Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was immaculate anonymity.”

“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.”

“But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone.”

“I was in the air around him. I was in the cold mornings he had now. I was in the quiet time he spent alone. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. -Susie Salmon”

“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.”

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

“Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.”

“Nothing is ever certain.”

“Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.”

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

“This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one”

“My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.”

“Loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“Hey, Ocean Eyes,” my father said. “Where’d you go on us?”

“The living deserve attention, too”

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

“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.”

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

“There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven.”

“There’s no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.”

“He had been my almost. My might-have-been.

I was afraid of what I wanted most - His kiss.

Still, I collected kiss stories.

-Susie Salmon”

“I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. He didn't want to burn my photo or toss it away, but he didn't want to look at me anymore, either.”

“She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything.”

“Last night it had been my father who had finally said it: "She’s never coming home." A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it.”

“Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go”

“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.”

“A father's suspicion…' she began.
Is as powerful as a mother's intuition.'


~pg 87, Ruana Singh and Jack Salmon”

“I left my mark on that man.”

“People grow up by living.”

“All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why -- really know -- it will come.”

“Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.”

“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.”

“Do you miss Susie?"
Because it was dark, because Ruth was facing away from her, because Ruth was almost a stranger, Lindsey said what she felt.
"More than anyone will ever know.”

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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