Top 160 Alice Sebold Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.”

— Alice Sebold

52. “Almost everyone in heaven has someone on Earth they watch, a loved one, a friend or even a stranger who was once kind, who offered warm food or a bright smile when one of us had needed it. And when I wasn’t watching I could hear the others talking to those they loved on Earth: just as fruitlessly as me, I’m afraid. A one-sided card cajoling and coaching of the young, a one way loving and desiring of their mates, a single-sided card that could never get signed.”

— Alice Sebold

53. “All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why – really know – it will come.”

— Alice Sebold

54. “In the drawing a thick blue line separated the air and ground. In the days that followed I watched my family walk back and forth past that drawing and I became convinced that that thick blue line was a real place – an Inbetween, where heaven’s horizon met Earth’s. I wanted to go there into the cornflower blue of Crayola, the royal, the turquoise, the sky.”

— Alice Sebold

55. “I tried to take solace in Holiday, our dog. I missed him in a way I hadn’t yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound silly but I didn’t believe it, would not believe it.”

— Alice Sebold

56. “Loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman.”

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

58. “The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy – the words on the page being sent back and forth from engaged editor to open author – is unique in my experience.”

— Alice Sebold

59. “If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.”

— Alice Sebold

60. “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.”

— Alice Sebold

61. “It’s very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.”

— Alice Sebold

62. “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?”

— Alice Sebold

63. “I focused very hard on the dead geranium in his line of vision. I thought if I could make it bloom he would have his answer. In my heaven it bloomed. In my heaven geranium petals swirled in eddies up to my waist. On Earth nothing happened... I stood alone in a sea of bright petals.”

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

65. “I was trying to prove to them and to myself that I was still who I had always been. I was beautiful, if fat. I was smart, if loud. I was good, if ruined.”

— Alice Sebold

66. “I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.”

— Alice Sebold

67. “I think that if you’re somebody who’s a control freak, the process would make you crazy, but I’m kind of a process freak, so I’m excited to see what he does with it. I know it’s not going to be my book, so just starting with that knowledge frees me from having to get all freaked out about it.”

— Alice Sebold

68. “But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone.”

— Alice Sebold

69. “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.”

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

71. “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.”

— Alice Sebold

72. “The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see a figure standing at the end of thier bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus.”

— Alice Sebold

73. “I would do exactly what you are doing: I would talk to everyone I needed to, I would not tell too many people his name. When I was sure,” she said, “I would find a quiet way, and I would kill him.”

— Alice Sebold

74. “After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury hurled directly at me for reasons I remain unsure of.”

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

76. “Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult.”

— Alice Sebold

77. “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.”

— Alice Sebold

78. “Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go.”

— Alice Sebold

79. “People grow up by living.”

— Alice Sebold

80. “I wanted to be the moron of the family, because morons seemed to have more fun, more freedom and more personality.”

— Alice Sebold

81. “As if in the other side of his kiss there could ve a new life.”

— Alice Sebold

82. “When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living – to learn to accept?”

— Alice Sebold

83. “In this deeply nuanced portrait of an American family, Bret Anthony Johnston fearlessly explores the truth behind a mythic happy ending. In Remember Me Like This, Johnston presents an incisive dismantling of an all-too-comforting fallacy: that in being found we are no longer lost.”

— Alice Sebold

84. “Well, as my dad would say, it means she’s out of this shithole.”

— Alice Sebold

85. “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.”

— Alice Sebold

86. “But also I wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was granted one weak grace. Back in the room where the green chair was still warm from his body, I blew that lonely, flickering candle out.”

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

88. “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?”

— Alice Sebold

89. “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.”

— Alice Sebold

90. “And as Flora twirled, other girls and women came through the field in all directions. Our heartache poured into one another like water from cup to cup. 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

91. “I explained myself like this: I did not feel adamant about saying no, but I also didn’t feel adamant about saying yes, so until I felt strongly one way or another, I’d stick with no.”

— Alice Sebold

92. “The living deserve attention, too.”

— Alice Sebold

93. “The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: “booze affects material as it does people.”

— Alice Sebold

94. “As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.”

— Alice Sebold

95. “His love for my mother wasn’t about looking back and loving something that would never change. It was about loving my mother for everything – for her brokenness and her fleeing, for her being there right then in that moment before the sun rose and the hospital staff came in. It was about touching that hair with the side of his fingertip, and knowing yet plumbing fearlessly the depths of her ocean eyes.”

— Alice Sebold

96. “I think you only learn what kind of personality you have by committing to things.”

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

98. “Ruth had been a girl haunted and now she would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of it, the story of my life and death, was hers if she chose to tell it, even to one person at a time.”

— Alice Sebold

99. “She liked to imagine that when she passed, the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was. Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was immaculate anonymity.”

— Alice Sebold

100. “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.”

— Alice Sebold