Quote

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.

Alice Sebold

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Certain
Assumptions
Life
Assumption
World
Held
Worked
Safe
Almost
Raped
Lost
Virginity
Also
Discarded

More quotes by Alice Sebold

Image
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
Image
She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was.
Alice Sebold
Image
Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.
Alice Sebold
Image
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
Image
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.
Alice Sebold
Image
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.
Alice Sebold
Image
Please don't let Daddy die Susie, he whispered. I need him.
Alice Sebold
Image
Hey, Ocean Eyes,” my father said. “Where’d you go on us?
Alice Sebold
Image
The sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. I think she listens, she said, too softly to be heard.
Alice Sebold
Image
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?
Alice Sebold
Image
I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines.
Alice Sebold
Image
Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun it cannot be contained.
Alice Sebold
Image
Part of the creative process for me is an invitation for readers to follow their imagination.
Alice Sebold
Image
I was like I was in science class: I was curious.
Alice Sebold
Image
I loved the way the burned-out flashcubes of the Kodak Instamatic marked a moment that had passed, one that would now be gone forever except for a picture.
Alice Sebold
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.
Alice Sebold
Image
Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.
Alice Sebold
Image
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.
Alice Sebold