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121 " But also I wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was granted one weak grace. Back in the room where the green chair was still warm from his body, I blew that lonely, flickering candle out "
― Alice Sebold , The Lovely Bones
122 " At Evensong one night, while Holly played at sax and Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer joined in, I saw him: Holiday, racing past a fluffy white Samoyed. He had lived to a ripe old age on earth and slept at my father's feet after my mother left, never wanting to let him out of his sight... I waited for him to sniff me out, anxious to know if here, on the other side, I would still be the little girl he slept beside. I did not have to wait long: he was so happy to see me, he knocked me down. "
123 " Look what happens when we dream. "
124 " She had a stare that stretched to infinity. She was, in that moment, not my mother but something separate from me. "
125 " I wondered if this longing in a three-year-old had sparked what came at eight. That fuzzy feeling of difference, that her crushes on female teachers or her cousin were more real than the other girls' crushes. Hers contained a desire beyond sweetness and attention, it fed a longing, beginning to flower green and yellow into a crocuslike lust, the soft petals opening into her awkward adolescence. It was not so much, she would write in her journal, that she wanted to have sex with women, but that she wanted to disappear inside of them forever. To hide. "
126 " By the time I was eighteen, she had sat me down and detailed her alcoholism, its onset and aftermath. She believed that by sharing such things I might be able to avoid them or, if need be, recognize them when they occurred. By talking about them to her children, she was also acknowledging that they were real and that they had an effect on us too, that things like this shaped a family, not just the person they happened to. "
― Alice Sebold , Lucky
127 " She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was. "
― Alice Sebold , The Lovely Bones & Looking Glass
128 " So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. "
129 " 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. "
130 " She thought of sex as the Star Trek transport.You vaporized and found yourself navigating another planet within the second or two it took to realign. "
131 " Mi madre era eterna como la luna. Viva o muerta, la madre o la ausencia de la madre siempre determina la vida de una persona". "
― Alice Sebold , The Almost Moon
132 " She could shut out the whole world, including herself. "
133 " About Grandma Lynn: She was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. At seventy, she had come to believe in time alone. "
134 " At nearly two months,the idea of it as news was fading in the hearts of all but my family-and Ruth "
135 " You don't notice the dead leaving when they really hoose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. "
136 " Heaven wasn't perfect. "
137 " When they reached the lobby and the doors opened I knew they were meant to be there, the four of them, alone. "
138 " I focused very hard on the dead geranium in his line of vision. I thought if I could make it bloom he would have his answer. In my heaven it bloomed. In my heaven geranium petals swirled in eddies up to my waist. On Earth nothing happened... I stood alone in a sea of bright petals. "
139 " I now think that was distanced me from Tricia and from the Rape Crisis Center was their use of generalities. I did not want to be one of a group or compared with others. It somehow blindsided my sense that I was going to survive. Tricia prepared me for failure by saying that it would be okay if I failed. She did this by showing me that the odds out there were against me. But what she told me, I didn't want to hear. In the face of dismal statistics regarding arrest, prosecution, and even full recovery for the victim, I saw no choice but to ignore the statistics. I needed what gave me hope, like being assigned a female assistant district attorney, not the news that the number of rape prosecutions in Syracuse for that calendar year had been nil. "
140 " One day, Buckley came home from the second grade with a story he’d written: “Once upon a time there was a kid named Billy. He liked to explore. He saw a hole and went inside but he never came out. The End. "