Quotes by Alice Sebold

“Placing blame was easier than adding up the mounting figures of what he'd lost.”

“I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind of...”

“At some point, to counter the list of the dead, I had begun keeping my own list of the living. It was something I noticed Len Fenerman did too. When he was off duty he would note the young girls an...”

“I wake up very early in the morning. I like to start in the dark, and I never work at night, because my brain is evaporated by 4 P.M.”

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

“The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy - the words on the page being sent back and forth from eng...”

“How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home?”

“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...”

“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.”

“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 s...”

“Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.”

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

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

“Nothing is ever certain.”

“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 a...”

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

“He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.”

“Judging Natalie as my mother had judged me was, I felt like telling her son, just my ass-backward way of showing love. I'd spent my life trying to translate that language, and now I realized I had ...”

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

“I was like I was in science class: I was curious.”