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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
Running
Sister
Away
Wounds
Beautiful
Shot
Wound
Someone
Bones
Closing
Long
Shots
Scar
Years
Eight
Survived
Like
Toward
Watched
Knew
Guts

More quotes by Alice Sebold

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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.
Alice Sebold
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After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury hurled directly at me for reasons I remain unsure of.
Alice Sebold
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I would do exactly what you are doing: I would talk to everyone I needed to, I would not tell too many people his name. When I was sure, she said, I would find a quiet way, and I would kill him.
Alice Sebold
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A father's suspicion...' she began. Is as powerful as a mother's intuition.' ~pg 87, Ruana Singh and Jack Salmon
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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I dont think ignorance is a way that you gain distance on something.
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child
Alice Sebold
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I tried to take solace in Holiday, our dog. I missed him in a way I hadn't yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again it might sound silly but I didn't believe it, would not believe it.
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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As if in the other side of his kiss there could ve a new life
Alice Sebold
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Nothing is ever certain.
Alice Sebold
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Depending on where I am in the process, sometimes I have a page count and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I have an hour count sometimes I'm just happy to string a few words together. I do keep pretty rigorous hours, because otherwise you never get anything done.
Alice Sebold
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Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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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?
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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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