Alice Sebold > Quotes

“You save yourself or you remain unsaved.”
― Alice Sebold

“Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.”
― Alice Sebold

“Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“Nothing is ever certain.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“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. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“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, The Lovely Bones

“Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“How to Commit the Perfect Murder" was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“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, The Lovely Bones

“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, The Lovely Bones

“This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand”
― Alice Sebold, Lucky

“Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“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, The Lovely Bones

“Loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“Your first kiss is destiny knocking.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“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, The Lovely Bones

“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?”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out.Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room.
Grandma Lynn died several years later, but I have yet to see her here. I imagine her tying it on in her heaven, drinking mint juleps with Tennessee Williams and Dean Martin. She'll be here in her own sweet time, I'm sure.
If I'm to be honest with you, I still sneak away to watch my family sometimes. I can't help it, and sometimes they still think of me. They can't help it....
It was a suprise to everyone when Lindsey found out she was pregnant...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.
I would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe. But this heaven is not about safety just as, in its graciousness, it isn't about gritty reality. We have fun.
We do things that leave humans stumped and grateful, like Buckley's garden coming up one year, all of its crazy jumble of plants blooming all at once. I did that for my mother who, having stayed, found herself facing the yard again. Marvel was what she did at all the flowers and herbs and budding weeds. Marveling was what she mostly did after she came back- at the twists life took.
And my parents gave my leftover possessions to the Goodwill, along with Grandma Lynn's things.
They kept sharing when they felt me. Being together, thinking and talking about the dead, became a perfectly normal part of their life. And I listened to my brother, Buckley, as he beat the drums.
Ray became Dr. Singh... And he had more and more moments that he chose not to disbelieve. Even if surrounding him were the serious surgeons and scientists who ruled over a world of black and white, he maintained this possibility: that the ushering strangers that sometimes appeared to the dying were not the results of strokes, that he had called Ruth by my name, and that he had, indeed, made love to me.
If he ever doubted, he called Ruth. Ruth, who graduated from a closet to a closet-sized studio on the Lower East Side. Ruth, who was still trying to find a way to write down whom she saw and what she had experienced. Ruth, who wanted everyone to believe what she knew: that the dead truly talk to us, that in the air between the living, spirits bob and weave and laugh with us. They are the oxygen we breathe.
Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort.
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. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish. 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, The Lovely Bones

“Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort.

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. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish. ”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant
gone.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“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, The Lovely Bones

“I fell in love with you again; While you were away - Jack Salmon”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“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, The Almost Moon

“Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“The stains could be seen only in the sunlight, so Ruth was never really aware of them until later, when she would stop at an outdoor cafe for a cup of coffee, and look down at her skirt and see the dark traces of spilled vodka or whiskey. 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, The Lovely Bones

“Hey, Ocean Eyes,” my father said. “Where’d you go on us?”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“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, The Lovely Bones

“And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“I forgive you," I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.”
― Alice Sebold, Lucky

“Buckley followed the three of them into the kitchen and asked, as he had at least once a day, “Where’s Susie?”

They were silent. Samuel looked at Lindsey.

“Buckley,” my father called from the adjoining room, “come play Monopoly with me.”

My brother had never been invited to play Monopoly. Everyone said he was too young, but this was the magic of Christmas. He rushed into the family room, and my father picked him up and sat him on his lap.

“See this shoe?” my father said.

Buckley nodded his head.

“I want you to listen to everything I say about it, okay?”

“Susie?” my brother asked, somehow connecting the two.

“Yes, I’m going to tell you where Susie is.”

I began to cry up in heaven. What else was there for me to do?

“This shoe was the piece Susie played Monopoly with,” he said. “I play with the car or sometimes the wheelbarrow. Lindsey plays with the iron, and when you mother plays, she likes the cannon.”

“Is that a dog?”

“Yes, that’s a Scottie.”

“Mine!”

“Okay,” my father said. He was patient. He had found a way to explain it. He held his son in his lap, and as he spoke, he felt Buckley’s small body on his knee-the very human, very warm, very alive weight of it. It comforted him. “The Scottie will be your piece from now on. Which piece is Susie’s again?”

“The shoe?” Buckley asked.

“Right, and I’m the car, your sister’s the iron, and your mother is the cannon.”

My brother concentrated very hard.

“Now let’s put all the pieces on the board, okay? You go ahead and do it for me.”

Buckley grabbed a fist of pieces and then another, until all the pieces lay between the Chance and Community Chest cards.

“Let’s say the other pieces are our friends?”

“Like Nate?”

“Right, we’ll make your friend Nate the hat. And the board is the world. Now if I were to tell you that when I rolled the dice, one of the pieces would be taken away, what would that mean?”

“They can’t play anymore?”

“Right.”

“Why?” Buckley asked.

He looked up at my father; my father flinched.

“Why?” my brother asked again.

My father did not want to say “because life is unfair” or “because that’s how it is”. He wanted something neat, something that could explain death to a four-year-old He placed his hand on the small of Buckley’s back.

“Susie is dead,” he said now, unable to make it fit in the rules of any game. “Do you know what that means?”

Buckley reached over with his hand and covered the shoe. He looked up to see if his answer was right.

My father nodded. "You won’t see Susie anymore, honey. None of us will.” My father cried. Buckley looked up into the eyes of our father and did not really understand.

Buckley kept the shoe on his dresser, until one day it wasn't there anymore and no amount of looking for it could turn up.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. ”
― Alice Sebold

“The living deserve attention, too”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines. ”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“Years passed. The trees in our yard grew taller. I watched my family and my friends and neighbors, the teachers whom I'd had or imaged having, the high school I had dreamed about. As I sat in the gazebo I would pretend instead that I was sitting on the topmost branch of the maple under which my brother had swallowed a stick and still played hide-and-seek with Nate, or I would perch on the railing of a stairwell in New York and wait for Ruth to pass near. I would study with Ray. Drive the Pacific Coast Highway on a warm afternoon of salty air with my mother. But I would end each day with my father in his den.

I would lay these photographs down in my mind, those gathered from my constant watching, and I could trace how one thing- my death- connected these images to a single source. No one could have predicted how my loss would change small moments on Earth. But I held on to those moments, hoarded them. None of them were lost as long as I was there.”
― Alice Sebold

“There’s no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“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, The Lovely Bones

“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, The Lovely Bones

“I left my mark on that man.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“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, The Lovely Bones

“If I walked too far and wondered loud enough the fields would change. I could look down and see horse corn and I could hear it then- singing- a kind of low humming and moaning warning me back from the edge. My head would throb and the sky would darken and it would be that night again, that perpetual yesterday lived again. My soul solidifying, growing heavy. I came up to the lip of my grave this way many times but had yet to stare in.
I did begin to wonder what the word heaven meant. I thought, if this were heaven, truly heaven, it would be where my grandparents lived. Where my father's father, my favorite of them all, would lift me up and dance with me. I would feel only joy and have no memory, no cornfield and no grave.
You can have that,' Franny said to me. 'Plenty of people do.'
How do you make the switch?' I asked.
It's not as easy as you might think,' she said. 'You have to stop desiring certain answers.'
I don't get it.'
If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vaccum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling,' she said, 'you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth.'
This seemed impossible to me.
...
She used the bathroom, running the tap noisily and disturbing the towels. She knew immediately that her mother had bought these towels- cream, a ridiculous color for towels- and monogrammed- also ridiculous, my mother thought. But then, just as quickly, she laughed at herself. She was beginning to wonder how useful her scorched-earth policy had been to her all these years. Her mother was loving if she was drunk, solid if she was vain. When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living- to learn to accept?
I was not in the bathroom, in the tub, or in the spigot; I did not hold court in the mirror above her head or stand in miniature at the tip of every bristle on Lindsey's or Buckley's toothbrush. In some way I could not account for- had they reached a state of bliss? were my parents back together forever? had Buckley begun to tell someone his troubles? would my father's heart truly heal?- I was done yearning for them, needing them to yearn for me. Though I still would. Though they still would. Always.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“My little brother's greatest fear was that the one person who meant so much to him would go away. He loved Lindsey and Grandma Lynn and Samuel and Hal, but my father kept him stepping lightly, son gingerly monitoring father every morning and every evening as if, without such vigilance, he would lose him.
We stood- the dead child and the living- on either side of my father, both wanting the same thing. To have him to ourselves forver. To please us both was an impossibility.
...
'Please don't let Daddy die, Susie,' he whispered. 'I need him.'

When I left my brother, I walked out past the gazebo and under the lights hanging down like berries, and I saw the brick paths branching out as I advanced.
I walked until the bricks turned to flat stones and then to small, sharp rocks and then to nothing but churned earth for miles adn miles around me. I stood there. I had been in heaven long enough to know that something would be revealed. And as the light began to fade and the sky to turn a dark, sweet blue as it had on the night of my death, I saw something walking into view, so far away I could not at first make out if it was man or woman, child or adult. But as moonlight reached this figure I could make out a man and, frightened now, my breathing shallow, I raced just far enough to see. Was it my father? Was it what I had wanted all this time so deperately?
'Susie,' the man said as I approached and then stopped a few feet from where he stood. He raised his arms up toward me.
'Remember?' he said.
I found myself small again, age six and in a living room in Illinois. Now, as I had done then, I placed my feet on top of his feet.
'Granddaddy,' I said.
And because we were all alone and both in heaven, I was light enough to move as I had moved when I was six and in a living room in Illinois. Now, as I had done then, I placed my feet on top of his feet.
'Granddaddy,' I said.
And because we were all alone and both in heaven, I was light enough to move as I had moved when I was six and he was fifty-six and my father had taken us to visit. We danced so slowly to a song that on Earth had always made my grandfather cry.
'Do you remember?' he asked.
'Barber!'
'Adagio for Strings,' he said.
But as we danced and spun- none of the herky-jerky awkwardness of Earth- what I remembered was how I'd found him crying to this music and asked him why.
'Sometimes you cry,' Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.' He had held me against him then, just briefly, and then I had run outside to play again with Lindsey in what seemed like my grandfather's huge backyard.
We didn't speak any more that night, but we danced for hours in that timeless blue light. I knew as we danced that something was happening on Earth and in heaven. A shifting. The sort of slow-to-sudden movement that we'd read about in science class one year. Seismic, impossible, a rending and tearing of time and space. I pressed myself into my grandfather's chest and smelled the old-man smell of him, the mothball version of my own father, the blood on Earth, the sky in heaven. The kumquat, skunk, grade-A tobacco.
When the music stopped, it cold have been forever since we'd begun. My grandfateher took a step back, and the light grew yellow at his back.
'I'm going,' he said.
'Where?' I asked.
'Don't worry, sweetheart. You're so close.'
He turned and walked away, disappearing rapidly into spots and dust. Infinity.
~pgs 258-261; stretched to thin, Susie giving up on Earth”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“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.
~pg 254”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“And in a small house five miles away was a man who held my mud-encrusted charm bracelet out to his wife.


Look what I found at the old industrial park," he said. "A construction guy said they were bulldozing the whole lot. They're afraid of sink holes like that one that swallowed the cars."


His wife poured him some water from the sink as he fingered the tiny bike and the ballet shoe, the flower basket and the thimble. He held out the muddy bracelet as she set down his glass.


This little girl's grown up by now," she said.


Almost. Not quite.


I wish you all a long and happy life.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“No one can pull anyone back from anywhere. You save yourself or you remain unsaved.”
― Alice Sebold, Lucky

“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.”
― Alice Sebold