276 Quotes by Alice Sebold

Once released from life, having lost it in such violence, I couldn’t calculate my steps. I didn’t have time for contemplation. In violence it is the getting out that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from the shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping to land away from where you are.

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.

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

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?

Like a medical procedure,' Ruth said. 'Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet.

No one on the street thought anything of the downtown girl dressed in black who had paused in the middle of midtown foot traffic. In her art student camouflage she could walk the entire length of Manhattan and, if not blend in, be classified and therefore ignored.

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.

All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why -- really know -- it will come.

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.