Top 166 Quotes & Sayings by Alice Sebold
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Alice Sebold.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.
We all work hard to understand the dynamic relationship we have with a parent.
For me, heaven would be a lack of alienation. The whole time I was growing up, I felt comfort was inherently evil. I think that, for me, heaven isn't about couches and milk shakes and never having a troubling thought again.
I went to church irregularly and was mostly reading comics in the pew.
I think understanding is the way to gain perspective - and therefore can live among those hideous realities. You can live with them.
I'm gradually working through my obsessions, and maybe, when they're all free and clear, I'll write a comedy. But I'm not there yet.
Depending on where I am in the process, sometimes I have a page count and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I have an hour count; sometimes I'm just happy to string a few words together. I do keep pretty rigorous hours, because otherwise you never get anything done.
In my 20s, I railed against anything 'spiritual'; I thought it was all crap.
I like gardening - it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.
I find talking about my work harder than it might be if honesty wasn't my calling card.
I have always felt extremely weird. But I am very happy with my weirdnesses, and I want other people to be very happy with theirs.
I wanted to be the moron of the family, because morons seemed to have more fun, more freedom and more personality.
To me, the idea of heaven would give you certain pleasures, certain joys - but it's very important to have an intellectual understanding of why you want those things.
I think you only learn what kind of personality you have by committing to things.
I wanted to be a novelist for so long.
I have never been shy about listening to the input of others and weighing it seriously.
I always had that sense of being censored for the things that I thought. Why is it wrong to embroider your pants, or paint with acrylics on your clothing? Why is that weird? Isn't it weirder to want to be like everyone else?
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.
I wake up very early in the morning. I like to start in the dark, and I never work at night, because my brain is evaporated by 4 P.M.
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.
I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't.
I think it's an interesting thing to me, because we have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things.
I don't think ignorance is a way that you gain distance on something.
Everyday he got up. Before sleep wore off, he was who he used to be. Then, as his consciousness woke, it was as if poison seeped in. At first he couldn't even get up. He lay there under a heavy weight. But then only movment could save him, and he moved and he moved and he moved, no movement being enough to make up for it. The guilt on him, the hand of God pressing down on him, saying, You were not there when your daughter needed you.
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.
I fell in love with you again; While you were away - Jack Salmon
If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.
You look invincible,' my mother said one night. I loved these times, when we seemed to feel the same thing. I turned to her, wrapped in my thin gown, and said: I am.
I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand
Hey, Ocean Eyes,” my father said. “Where’d you go on us?
How to Commit the Perfect Murder" was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.
All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why -- really know -- it will come.
Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.
The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.
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.
She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was.
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.
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.
Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.
You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any other girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate.
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.
We have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things. So it made sense to me to reflect the human condition that not every action has an explanation. We act, and then later maybe come to an understanding about it, or maybe not.
To transform experience and thought into language and narrative - that is beautiful even if that beauty is in brokenness.
I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines.
Nothing is ever certain.
There was one thing my murderer didn't understand; he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.
There’s no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.
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.
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.
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?
Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.
Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
Your first kiss is destiny knocking.
She didn't even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house--it was the eyes, her dancer's carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.
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 missed her then but it was an odd sort of missing because by then, I knew the meaning of forever.
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.
You save yourself or you remain unsaved.
Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?
He tunneled into stories where weak men changed into strong half-animals or used eye beams or magic hammers to power through steel or climb up the sides of skyscrapers. He was the Hulk when angry and Spidey the rest of the time. When he felt his heart hurt he turned into something stronger than a little boy, and he grew up this way. A heart that flashed from heart to stone, heart to stone. As I watched I thought of what Grandma Lynn liked to say when Lindsey and I rolled our eyes or grimaced behind her back. "Watch out what faces you make. You'll freeze that way.
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