Alice Sebold Quotes

How to Commit the Perfect Murder" was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.

You save yourself or you remain unsaved.

I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines.

Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.

Your first kiss is destiny knocking.

I like gardening - it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.

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.

I would like to tell you that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe.

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

Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.

He took the hat from my mouth. ''Tell me you love me'', he said. Gently I did. The end came anyway

Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.

A father's suspicion...' she began. Is as powerful as a mother's intuition.' ~pg 87, Ruana Singh and Jack Salmon

I was in the air around him. I was in the cold mornings he had now. I was in the quiet time he spent alone. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. -Susie Salmon

I fell in love with you again; While you were away - Jack Salmon

My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.

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 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.

Hey, Ocean Eyes,” my father said. “Where’d you go on us?

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.

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.

To transform experience and thought into language and narrative - that is beautiful even if that beauty is in brokenness.

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.

Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.

What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.

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

I wish you all a long and happy life

What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child

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?

Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.

Nothing is ever certain.

"When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things," Franny said. "What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?"

There’s no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.

Like snowflakes,' Franny said,'none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before

Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?

If I had but an hour of love,if that be all that is given me,an hour of love upon this earth,I would give my love to thee.

There was one thing my murderer didn't understand; he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.

You're not supposed to look back, you're supposed to keep going.

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.

Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.

He had been my almost. My might-have-been. I was afraid of what I wanted most - His kiss. Still, I collected kiss stories. -Susie Salmon

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.

I had always been in love with him. I counted the lashes of each closed eye. He had been my almost, my might have been, and I did not want to leave him

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

I was like I was in science class: I was curious.

Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.

Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.

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

There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven.

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.