Alice Sebold: Timing

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

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

“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.”