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It's very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.

Alice Sebold

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Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Life
Nine
Succeed
Failure
Realize
Slowly
Building
Midst
Realizing
Thirty
Wanted
Anyway
Years
Weird

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Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions
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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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Those who say they would rather fight to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped a thousand times. You do what you have to.
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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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I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. He didn't want to burn my photo or toss it away, but he didn't want to look at me anymore, either.
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Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.
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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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Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.
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The moon is whole all the time, but we can’t always see it. What we see is an almost moon or not-quite moon. The rest is hiding just out of view, but there’s only one moon, so we follow it in the sky. We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides.
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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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Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?
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I think that if you're somebody who's a control freak, the process would make you crazy, but I'm kind of a process freak, so I'm excited to see what he does with it. I know it's not going to be my book, so just starting with that knowledge frees me from having to get all freaked out about it.
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Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.
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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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Last night it had been my father who had finally said it: She’s never coming home. A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it.
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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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All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why -- really know -- it will come.
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I left my mark on that man.
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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.
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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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