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I was in the air around him. I was in the cold mornings he had now. I was in the quiet time he spent alone. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. -Susie Salmon

Alice Sebold

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Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Girl
Kissing
Around
Spent
Wanted
Air
Susie
Time
Quiet
Mornings
Cold
Salmon
Alone
Kiss
Morning
Chosen
Free
Somehow

More quotes by Alice Sebold

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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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Do you miss Susie? Because it was dark, because Ruth was facing away from her,because Ruth was almost a stranger, Lindsey said what she felt. More than anyone will ever know.
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My name is Salmon, like the fish first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.
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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.
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There was our father, the heart we knew held all of us. Held us heavily and desperately, the doors of his heart opening and closing with the rapidity of stops on an instrument, the quiet felt closures, the ghostly fingering, practice and practice and then, incredibly, sound and melody and warmth.
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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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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.
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I like gardening - it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.
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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.
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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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but, he also said it because part of him wanted more of her, this cold woman who was not exactly cold, this rock who was not stone.
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He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.
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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.
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And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.
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I forgive you, I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.
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You save yourself or you remain unsaved.
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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.
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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.
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He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.
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Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions
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