Top 160 Alice Sebold Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I wish you all a long and happy life.”

— Alice Sebold

Featured in: Thinking of You Quotes

2. “No one can pull anyone back from anywhere. You save yourself or you remain unsaved.”

— Alice Sebold

3. “This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one.”

— Alice Sebold

4. “Murderers are not monsters, they’re men. And that’s the most frightening thing about them.”

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

6. “Nothing is ever certain.”

— Alice Sebold

7. “You’re not supposed to look back, you’re supposed to keep going.”

— Alice Sebold

8. “Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions.”

— Alice Sebold

9. “Every day a question mark.”

— Alice Sebold

10. “I’m fine with whatever comes my way, and whatever doesn’t come my way I’m fine with too. I have a very laissez-faire attitude with the whole thing.”

— Alice Sebold

11. “I have always felt extremely weird. But I am very happy with my weirdnesses, and I want other people to be very happy with theirs.”

— Alice Sebold

12. “Heaven is comfort, but it’s still not living.”

— Alice Sebold

13. “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.”

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

15. “Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow from the stronger one’s strength.”

— Alice Sebold

16. “I was here for a moment, and then I was gone. I wish you all a long and happy life.”

— Alice Sebold

17. “Between a man and a woman there was always one person who was stronger than the other one. That doesn’t mean the weaker one doesn’t love the stronger.”

— Alice Sebold

18. “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.”

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

20. “It’s hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you’re ultimately the author, so you do have control.”

— Alice Sebold

21. “I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind of rebel. Helpless, really.”

— Alice Sebold

22. “I’m just a friendly bystander who they occasionally ask questions of. That’s my level of involvement.”

— Alice Sebold

23. “I mean, if I went into my closet, I could find a previous draft and try to figure that out, but it takes a long time for me to find the voice to tell a story in. I was working from other points of view for a couple years there.”

— Alice Sebold

24. “These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it.”

— Alice Sebold

25. “I like gardening – it’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.”

— Alice Sebold

26. “Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.”

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

28. “I fell in love with you again; While you were away – Jack Salmon.”

— Alice Sebold

29. “And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.”

— Alice Sebold

30. “Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.”

— Alice Sebold

31. “Last night it had been my father who had finally said it: “She’s never coming home.” A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it.”

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

33. “Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.”

— Alice Sebold

34. “Your first kiss is destiny knocking.”

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

36. “I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. He didn’t want to burn my photo or toss it away, but he didn’t want to look at me anymore, either.”

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

39. “I’m not a slash-and-burn kind, and I’m also not a posterity kind. They just kind of exist on my hard drive. It’s like walking down the street – what you leave behind is still there, even if you never go back and revisit it.”

— Alice Sebold

40. “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?”

— Alice Sebold

41. “He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.”

— Alice Sebold

42. “Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?”

— Alice Sebold

43. “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.”

— Alice Sebold

44. “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.”

— Alice Sebold

45. “I missed her then but it was an odd sort of missing because by then, I knew the meaning of forever.”

— Alice Sebold

46. “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.”

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

48. “There was our father, the heart we knew held all of us. Held us heavily and desperately, the doors of his heart opening and closing with the rapidity of stops on an instrument, the quiet felt closures, the ghostly fingering, practice and practice and then, incredibly, sound and melody and warmth.”

— Alice Sebold

49. “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.”

— Alice Sebold

50. “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.”

— Alice Sebold