Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.
Alice Sebold
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Wall
Sailed
Blood
Fourteen
Away
Windows
Place
Walls
Never
Sister
Horror
Window
Sex
More quotes by Alice Sebold
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
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
The living deserve attention, too
Alice Sebold
As she brought prospective buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag.
Alice Sebold
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
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.
Alice Sebold
I missed her then but it was an odd sort of missing because by then, I knew the meaning of forever.
Alice Sebold
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
It's hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you're ultimately the author, so you do have control.
Alice Sebold
Do you miss Susie? Because it was dark, because Ruth was facing away from her,because Ruth was almost a stranger, Lindsey said what she felt. More than anyone will ever know.
Alice Sebold
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
I'm just a friendly bystander who they occasionally ask questions of. That's my level of involvement.
Alice Sebold
Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.
Alice Sebold
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.
Alice Sebold
She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was.
Alice Sebold
Since then I've always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.
Alice Sebold
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
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
What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.
Alice Sebold
I was in the air around him. I was in the cold mornings he had now. I was in the quiet time he spent alone. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. -Susie Salmon
Alice Sebold