Quote

People grow up by living.

Alice Sebold

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Grow
Grows
Living
People

More quotes by Alice Sebold

Image
I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines.
Alice Sebold
Image
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
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
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?
Alice Sebold
Image
I mean, if I went into my closet, I could find a previous draft and try to figure that out, but it takes a long time for me to find the voice to tell a story in. I was working from other points of view for a couple years there.
Alice Sebold
Image
I tried to take solace in Holiday, our dog. I missed him in a way I hadn't yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again it might sound silly but I didn't believe it, would not believe it.
Alice Sebold
Image
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.
Alice Sebold
Image
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
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
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
Image
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.
Alice Sebold
Image
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.
Alice Sebold
Image
I wish you all a long and happy life
Alice Sebold
Image
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.
Alice Sebold
Image
Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.
Alice Sebold
Image
There’s no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.
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
Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions
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
Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.
Alice Sebold