276 Quotes by Alice Sebold

I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand.

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.

They would go back to their homes and put me to rest, a letter from the past never reopened or reread.

My name was Salmon like the fish, first name Susie.

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.

About Grandma Lynn: She was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. At seventy, she had come to believe in time alone.

Judging Natalie as my mother had judged me was, I felt like telling her son, just my ass-backward way of showing love. I’d spent my life trying to translate that language, and now I realized I had come to speak it fluently. When was it that you realized the thread woven through your DNA carried the relationship deformities of your blood relatives as much as it did their diabetes and bone density?

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.

In moments like this she thought of all the little girls who grew into adulthood and old age as a sort of cipher alphabet for all those who didn’t. Their lives would somehow be inextricably attached to all the girls who had been killed.