Alice Sebold Quotes

How to Commit the Perfect Murder" was an old game in heaven.

I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.

I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines.

Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.

Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.

I would like to tell you that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe.

I like gardening - it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.

She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was.

Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day.

It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.

He took the hat from my mouth. ''Tell me you love me'', he said. Gently I did. The end came anyway

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

A father's suspicion...' she began. Is as powerful as a mother's intuition.' ~pg 87, Ruana Singh and Jack Salmon

I fell in love with you again; While you were away - Jack Salmon

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.

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.

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.

My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.

Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly.

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.

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.

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.

I wish you all a long and happy life

Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.

What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.

Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.

If I had but an hour of love,if that be all that is given me,an hour of love upon this earth,I would give my love to thee.

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.

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.

Like snowflakes,' Franny said,'none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before

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.

The moon is whole all the time, but we can’t always see it.

What we see is an almost moon or not-quite moon. The rest is hiding just out of view, but there’s only one moon, so we follow it in the sky. We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides.

He had been my almost. My might-have-been. I was afraid of what I wanted most - His kiss. Still, I collected kiss stories. -Susie Salmon

You're not supposed to look back, you're supposed to keep going.

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.

"When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things," Franny said. "What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?"

There was one thing my murderer didn't understand;

he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.

What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child

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

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.

Hey, Ocean Eyes,” my father said. “Where’d you go on us?

Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions

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.

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.

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.

I was like I was in science class: I was curious.

There was our father, the heart we knew held all of us.

Held us heavily and desperately, the doors of his heart opening and closing with the rapidity of stops on an instrument, the quiet felt closures, the ghostly fingering, practice and practice and then, incredibly, sound and melody and warmth.

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.

As if in the other side of his kiss there could ve a new life

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?

Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.