276 Quotes by Alice Sebold

The earth has a mouth?” Buckley asked. A big round mouth but with no lips,” my father said. Jack,” my mother said, laughing, “stop it. Do you know I caught him outside growling at the snapdragons?

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.

Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort. 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. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish.

It's something that I know how to do because I taught for a very long time, so I can do it, and I feel a responsibility to do it - for instance, in this situation, where I'm touring specifically for this period of time. But most writers are not public people. There are a few writers out there who really enjoy it and are good at it, and can both work and do that at the same time, but I'm not one of those people.

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.

but, he also said it because part of him wanted more of her, this cold woman who was not exactly cold, this rock who was not stone.

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

If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.

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.