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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

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Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Stills
Lonely
Also
Green
Flickering
Still
Weak
Blew
Body
Room
Chair
Back
Rooms
Candle
Wanted
Leave
Chairs
Grace
Granted
Away
Warm

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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.
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Between a man and a woman there was always one person who was stronger than the other one. That doesn’t mean the weaker one doesn’t love the stronger.
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Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.
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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.
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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?
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The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was away . But when people left they always came back.
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In my 20s, I railed against anything 'spiritual', I thought it was all crap.
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I would like to tell you that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe.
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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.
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Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun it cannot be contained.
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Books and novels in particular that grapple with quite a few things are difficult to explain, so I think that first line can come in a substitute for trying to form a longer sense of what the book is about.
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Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow from the stronger one's strength.
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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.
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She sat in her room on the couch my parents had given up on and worked on hardening herself. Take deep breaths and hold them. Try to stay still for longer and longer periods of time. Make yourself small and like a stone. Curl the edges of yourself up and fold them under where no one can see. ~pg 29, Susie's sister Lindsey dealing with grief.
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But I know I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead — in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death — the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human — feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light - all of it part of navigating the unknown.
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