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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

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Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Trying
Books
Novels
Things
Difficult
Explain
Think
Sense
Line
Thinking
Form
Novel
Firsts
Longer
Book
Particular
Grapple
Come
Quite
Substitute
First
Lines
Substitutes

More quotes by Alice Sebold

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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
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I had always been in love with him. I counted the lashes of each closed eye. He had been my almost, my might have been, and I did not want to leave him
Alice Sebold
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The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.
Alice Sebold
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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
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I missed her then but it was an odd sort of missing because by then, I knew the meaning of forever.
Alice Sebold
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I watched my beautiful sister running . . . and I knew she was not running away from me or toward me. Like someone who has survived a gut-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a scar for eight long years.
Alice Sebold
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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
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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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I like gardening - it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.
Alice Sebold
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In this deeply nuanced portrait of an American family, Bret Anthony Johnston fearlessly explores the truth behind a mythic happy ending. In Remember Me Like This, Johnston presents an incisive dismantling of an all-too-comforting fallacy: that in being found we are no longer lost.
Alice Sebold
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Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.
Alice Sebold
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Loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman.
Alice Sebold
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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
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She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything.
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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I would like to tell you that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe.
Alice Sebold
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But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone. ~pg 254
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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He took the hat from my mouth. ''Tell me you love me'', he said. Gently I did. The end came anyway
Alice Sebold
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As if in the other side of his kiss there could ve a new life
Alice Sebold