Alice Sebold Quotes

Nothing is ever certain.

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

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

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

Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.

You save yourself or you remain unsaved.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

She had needed the time to know that this love would not destroy her, and I had, I now knew, given her that time, could give it, for it was what I had in great supply.

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 rebel. Helpless, really.

Oh sweetheart, do you really think if you
seal it up, that the pain's gonna go away?

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.

What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child

I never let myself yearn for Buckley, afraid he might see my image in a mirror or a bottle cap. Like everyone else I was trying to protect him.

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