Quote

One thing about failing repeatedly: If you're still doing it after you've failed that much, you really mean it.

Alice Sebold

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Failed
Failing
Stills
Still
Mean
Thing
Much
Really
Repeatedly

More quotes by Alice Sebold

Image
I like gardening - it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.
Alice Sebold
Image
I left my mark on that man.
Alice Sebold
Image
So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything.
Alice Sebold
Image
In my 20s, I railed against anything 'spiritual', I thought it was all crap.
Alice Sebold
Image
To transform experience and thought into language and narrative - that is beautiful even if that beauty is in brokenness.
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
Image
Part of the creative process for me is an invitation for readers to follow their imagination.
Alice Sebold
Image
My name is Salmon, like the fish first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.
Alice Sebold
Image
I forgive you, I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.
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
There was one thing my murderer didn't understand he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.
Alice Sebold
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
People grow up by living.
Alice Sebold
Image
Books and novels in particular that grapple with quite a few things are difficult to explain, so I think that first line can come in a substitute for trying to form a longer sense of what the book is about.
Alice Sebold
Image
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
Image
How to Commit the Perfect Murder was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.
Alice Sebold
Image
I have never been shy about listening to the input of others and weighing it seriously.
Alice Sebold
Image
The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was away . But when people left they always came back.
Alice Sebold