Quote

I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.

Alice Sebold

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Different
Brother
Dead
Learned
Lines
Murky
Living
Blurred
Father
Watched
Truth
Seemed
School
Line

More quotes by Alice Sebold

Image
Hold still, my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.
Alice Sebold
Image
Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.
Alice Sebold
Image
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
Image
It's hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you're ultimately the author, so you do have control.
Alice Sebold
Image
Like snowflakes,' Franny said,'none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before
Alice Sebold
Image
Please don't let Daddy die Susie, he whispered. I need him.
Alice Sebold
Image
Since then I've always thought that 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
Image
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
Image
At the tips of the feathers there is air and at their base: blood. I hold up bones I wish like broken glass they could court light....still I try to place these pieces back together, to set them firm, to make murdered girls live again.
Alice Sebold
Image
One thing about failing repeatedly: If you're still doing it after you've failed that much, you really mean it.
Alice Sebold
Image
As if in the other side of his kiss there could ve a new life
Alice Sebold
Image
He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.
Alice Sebold
Image
Your first kiss is destiny knocking.
Alice Sebold
Image
My name is Salmon, like the fish first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.
Alice Sebold
Image
The sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. I think she listens, she said, too softly to be heard.
Alice Sebold
Image
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
Image
Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions
Alice Sebold
Image
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
Image
He had been my almost. My might-have-been. I was afraid of what I wanted most - His kiss. Still, I collected kiss stories. -Susie Salmon
Alice Sebold
Image
I mean, if I went into my closet, I could find a previous draft and try to figure that out, but it takes a long time for me to find the voice to tell a story in. I was working from other points of view for a couple years there.
Alice Sebold