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I watched my beautiful sister running . . . and I knew she was not running away from me or toward me. Like someone who has survived a gut-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a scar for eight long years.

Alice Sebold

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Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Eight
Survived
Years
Toward
Watched
Like
Knew
Guts
Running
Sister
Away
Wounds
Shot
Wound
Beautiful
Bones
Closing
Someone
Shots
Scar
Long

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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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I was like I was in science class: I was curious.
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I left my mark on that man.
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He took the hat from my mouth. ''Tell me you love me'', he said. Gently I did. The end came anyway
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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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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 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
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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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Your first kiss is destiny knocking.
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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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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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I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines.
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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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How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home?
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When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things, Franny said. What about the dead? I asked. Where do we go?
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Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.
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The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy - the words on the page being sent back and forth from engaged editor to open author - is unique in my experience.
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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
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I'm not a slash-and-burn kind, and I'm also not a posterity kind. They just kind of exist on my hard drive. It's like walking down the street - what you leave behind is still there, even if you never go back and revisit it.
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