Alice Sebold Quotes

“Nothing is ever certain.”

“Stones and bones; snow and frost; seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Susie misses .”

“You aren’t leaving, Susie. You’re mine now. ”

″ The guilt on him, the hand of God pressing down on him. ”

“She had a stare that stretched to infinity. She was, in that moment, not my mother but something separate from me.”

“I wish you all a long and happy life. ”

“We’re here, you know ... All the time. You can talk to us and think about us. It doesn’t have to be sad or scary.”

“But I came to believe that if I watched closely, and desired, I might change the lives of those I loved on Earth.”

“I loved Ruth on those mornings . . . we were born to keep each other company. Odd girls who had found each other in the strangest way - in the shiver she had felt when I passed.”

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

“I could see an old and beautiful olive tree just up ahead. ”

“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.”

″ It was an elbow. The Gilbert’s dog found it. ”

“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.”

“He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of my death, and afterwards he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass.”

“He wore his innocence like a comfortable old coat.”

“No one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult. ”

“It was on 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 the sun; it cannot be contained. ”

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”

“I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away. ”