276 Quotes by Alice Sebold

Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish.

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.

Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.

I knew my mother's limitations because they formed the marrow of my bones.

There were also the Masters of Arcane Knowledge. Everyone begrudged their presence among the gifteds. These were the kids that could break down an engine and build it back again - no diagrams or instructions needed. They understood things in a real, not theoretical, way. They seemed not to care about their grades.

I felt like observing my way out of there, but I didn't.

Those who say they would rather fight to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped a thousand times. You do what you have to.

Hold still," my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.

She listened for the pain in my words, not to the narrative itself. She was intuiting what it meant to me, what was most important, what, in that confused mass of experience and yearning she heard in my voice, she could single out to give back.