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He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.

Alice Sebold

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Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Told
Special
Understand
Something
Would
Horrible
Treated
Later
Beginning

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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.
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One thing about failing repeatedly: If you're still doing it after you've failed that much, you really mean it.
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I'm just a friendly bystander who they occasionally ask questions of. That's my level of involvement.
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As she brought prospective buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag.
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I have always felt extremely weird. But I am very happy with my weirdnesses, and I want other people to be very happy with theirs.
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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.
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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.
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There’s no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.
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When the music stopped, it could have been forever since we'd begun. My grandfather took a step back, and the light grew yellow at his back. 'I'm going,' he said. 'Where?' I asked. 'Don't worry, sweetheart. You're so close.' He turned and walked away, disappearing rapidly into spots and dust. Infinity.
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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.
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Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.
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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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These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors. She kept an honor code with her journals and her poems. 'Inside, inside,' she would whisper quietly to herself when she felt the urge to tell.
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Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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