Top 160 Alice Sebold Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “When they reached the lobby and the doors opened I knew they were meant to be there, the four of them, alone.”

— Alice Sebold

102. “Please don’t let Daddy die Susie,” he whispered. “I need him.”

— Alice Sebold

103. “As she brought prospective buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag.”

— Alice Sebold

104. “I left my mark on that man.”

— Alice Sebold

105. “He had to seek out her eyes. They weren’t focusing on him. They seemed to be preoccupied, and he wished he could reach up and grab them and train them on here and now. On him.”

— Alice Sebold

106. “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.”

— Alice Sebold

107. “If you chose to go into someone else’s reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.”

— Alice Sebold

108. “I knew gloves meant you were an adult and mittens meant you weren’t.”

— Alice Sebold

109. “And there she was, alone and walking out in the cornfield while everyone else I cared for sat together in one room. She would always feel me and think of me. I could see that, but there was no longer anything I could do. 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 tot ell it, even to one person at a time.”

— Alice Sebold

110. “This wide wide Heaven is about flathead nails and the soft down of new leaves, wide roller coaster rides and escaped marbles that fall then hang then take you somewhere you could never have imagined in your small-heaven dreams.”

— Alice Sebold

111. “To transform experience and thought into language and narrative – that is beautiful even if that beauty is in brokenness.”

— Alice Sebold

112. “I don’t do much public speaking. I did a lot of stuff for Bones, and then ended up having said yes to a lot of things that kept me on the road for a while for that, but then I pretty much stopped. I’m touring for this book, but when the tour is done, that’ll be the end of it.”

— Alice Sebold

113. “I was like I was in science class: I was curious.”

— Alice Sebold

114. “Like a medical procedure,′ Ruth said. ‘Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet.”

— Alice Sebold

115. “One thing about failing repeatedly: If you’re still doing it after you’ve failed that much, you really mean it.”

— Alice Sebold

116. “She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything.”

— Alice Sebold

117. “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.”

— Alice Sebold

118. “Once released from life, having lost it in such violence, I couldn’t calculate my steps. I didn’t have time for contemplation. In violence it is the getting out that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from the shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping to land away from where you are.”

— Alice Sebold

119. “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.”

— Alice Sebold

120. “My name was Salmon like the fish, first name Susie.”

— Alice Sebold

121. “He hadn’t woken a day since my death when the day wasn’t something to get through. But the truth was, the memorial service day was not the worst kind. At least it was honest. At least it was a day shaped around what they were so preoccupied by: my absence. Today he would not have to pretend he was getting back to normal – whatever normal was.”

— Alice Sebold

122. “And i was gone.”

— Alice Sebold

123. “Books and novels in particular that grapple with quite a few things are difficult to explain, so I think that first line can come in a substitute for trying to form a longer sense of what the book is about.”

— Alice Sebold

124. “That I wanted more. That night I dreamed of kissing her again and wondered if she was thinking the same thing.”

— Alice Sebold

125. “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.”

— Alice Sebold

126. “She could shut out the whole world, including herself.”

— Alice Sebold

127. “I have never been shy about listening to the input of others and weighing it seriously.”

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

129. “In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are.”

— Alice Sebold

130. “For me, heaven would be a lack of alienation. The whole time I was growing up, I felt comfort was inherently evil. I think that, for me, heaven isnt about couches and milk shakes and never having a troubling thought again.”

— Alice Sebold

131. “Part of the creative process for me is an invitation for readers to follow their imagination.”

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

133. “We lay there with our bodies touching, and as I shook, a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all. I was still breathing. I heard his heart. I smelled his breath. The dark earth around us smelled like what it was, moist dirt where animals lived their daily lives. I could have yelled for hours.”

— Alice Sebold

134. “He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.”

— Alice Sebold

135. “These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors. She kept an honor code with her journals and her poems. ‘Inside, inside,’ she would whisper quietly to herself when she felt the urge to tell...”

— Alice Sebold

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

— Alice Sebold

137. “We’re here, you know... All the time. You can talk to us and think about us. It doesn’t have to be sad or scary.”

— Alice Sebold

138. “Well, it’s my voice, so it’s more accessible that way, and there are also all sorts of things like plot and timelines that are already known entities, so for me, it’s very different from writing fiction.”

— Alice Sebold

139. “For Lorenz, virgins were not a part of his world. He was skeptical of many things I said. Later, when the serology reports proved that what I had said was not a lie, that I had been a virgin, and that I was telling the truth, he could not respect me enough. I think he felt responsible, somehow. It was, after all, in his world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime.”

— Alice Sebold

140. “Since their first kiss in our kitchen two weeks after my death, I had known that he was – as my sister and I had giggled with our Barbies or while watching Bobby Sherman on TV – her one and only. Samuel had pressed himself into her need and the cement between the two of them had begun to set immediately. They had gone to Temple together, side by side. He had hated it and she had pushed him through. She had loved it and this had allowed him to survive.”

— Alice Sebold

141. “He wore his own innocence like a comfortable old coat.”

— Alice Sebold

142. “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 is had needed it.”

— Alice Sebold

143. “Ruth did not believe in makeup. She thought it demeaned women.”

— Alice Sebold

144. “My father dreamed that one day he might teach another child to love ships in bottles. He knew there would be both sadness and joy in it; that it would always hold an echo of me.”

— Alice Sebold

145. “Horror on earth is real and it is everyday. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.”

— Alice Sebold

146. “My mother’s desire to reach those waves, touch her feet to another ocean on the other side of the country, was all she was thinking of – the pure baptismal goal of it. Whoosh and you can start all over again. Or was life more like the horrible game in gym that has you running from one side of an enclosed space to another, picking up and setting down wooden blocks without end?”

— Alice Sebold

147. “She had needed the time to know that this love would not destroy her, and I had, I now knew, given her that time, could give it, for it was what I had in great supply.”

— Alice Sebold

148. “The niggling idea of what she would do as Ray grew older and her husband worked increasingly long hours crept up the inside of her foot and along her calf to the back of her knee and began to climb into her lap.”

— Alice Sebold

149. “It was in these moments, I knew, that my father loved my mother most. When my mother was broken and helpless, when her hard shell was stripped away and her spite and brittleness couldn’t serve her. It was a sad dance of two people who were starving to death in each other’s arms. Their marriage an X that forever joined murderer to victim.”

— Alice Sebold

150. “They were all things she would not give away in New York, where she watched others tell their drunken bar stories, prostituting their families and their trauma for popularity and booze. These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors.”

— Alice Sebold