Alice Sebold Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

I missed her then but it was an odd sort of missing because by then, I knew the meaning of forever.

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

Alice Sebold
The earth has a mouth? Buckley asked. A big round mouth but with no lips, my father said. Jack, my mother said, laughing, stop it. Do you know I caught him outside growling at the snapdragons?

Alice Sebold
Hey, Ocean Eyes, my father said. Where'd you go on us?

Alice Sebold
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

Alice Sebold
The stains could be seen only in the sunlight, so Ruth was never really aware of them until later, when she would stop at an outdoor cafe for a cup of coffee, and look down at her skirt and see the dark traces of spilled vodka or whiskey. 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'.

Alice Sebold
No one on the street thought anything of the downtown girl dressed in black who had paused in the middle of midtown foot traffic. In her art student camouflage she could walk the entire length of Manhattan and, if not blend in, be classified and therefore ignored.

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

Alice Sebold
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.

Alice Sebold
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.

Alice Sebold
And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.

Alice Sebold
But, he also said it because part of him wanted more of her, this cold woman who was not exactly cold, this rock who was not stone.

Alice Sebold
When I was raped I lost my virginity and almost lost my life. I also discarded certain assumptions I had held about how the world worked and about how safe I was.

Alice Sebold
Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.

Alice Sebold
I had always been in love with him. I counted the lashes of each closed eye. He had been my almost, my might have been, and I did not want to leave him

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

Alice Sebold
Stones and bones; snow and frost; seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Daddy misses! His two little frogs of girls, that's who. They know where they are, do you, do you?

Alice Sebold
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.

Alice Sebold
There was our father, the heart we knew held all of us. Held us heavily and desperately, the doors of his heart opening and closing with the rapidity of stops on an instrument, the quiet felt closures, the ghostly fingering, practice and practice and then, incredibly, sound and melody and warmth.

Alice Sebold
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.

Alice Sebold
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.

Alice Sebold
Under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse; rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.

Alice Sebold
Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.

Alice Sebold