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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
Failure
Realize
Slowly
Building
Midst
Thirty
Realizing
Anyway
Wanted
Weird
Years
Nine
Life
Succeed

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Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions
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Stones and bones snow and frost seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Daddy misses! His two little frogs of girls, that’s who. They know where they are, do you, do you?
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In my 20s, I railed against anything 'spiritual', I thought it was all crap.
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The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see a figure standing at the end of thier bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus.
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There was one thing my murderer didn't understand he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.
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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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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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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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Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.
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The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.
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Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go
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I don't do much public speaking. I did a lot of stuff for Bones, and then ended up having said yes to a lot of things that kept me on the road for a while for that, but then I pretty much stopped. I'm touring for this book, but when the tour is done, that'll be the end of it.
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If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.
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Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. 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 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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The living deserve attention, too
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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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She didn't even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house--it was the eyes, her dancer's carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.
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But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone. ~pg 254
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Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow from the stronger one's strength.
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