Quote

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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Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Time
Death
Instead
Groping
Love
Felt
Went
Helplessness
Feelings
Sort
Unknown
Light
Alive
Bright
Part
Feeling
Corners
Human
Taken
Pity
Humans
Dark
Opening
Would
Fall
Arms
Navigating

More quotes by Alice Sebold

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Nothing is ever certain.
Alice Sebold
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I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found how to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.
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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Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.
Alice Sebold
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She liked to imagine that when she passed, the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was. Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was immaculate anonymity.
Alice Sebold
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He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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The living deserve attention, too
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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Between a man and a woman there was always one person who was stronger than the other one. That doesn’t mean the weaker one doesn’t love the stronger.
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy - the words on the page being sent back and forth from engaged editor to open author - is unique in my experience.
Alice Sebold
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Please don't let Daddy die Susie, he whispered. I need him.
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
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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.
Alice Sebold
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Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.
Alice Sebold
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Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.
Alice Sebold
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For me, heaven would be a lack of alienation. The whole time I was growing up, I felt comfort was inherently evil. I think that for me heaven isn't about couches and milk shakes and never having a troubling thought again.
Alice Sebold