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625c1be
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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
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Alice Sebold |
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9ec7834
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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."
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Alice Sebold |
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39a91d5
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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.
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beauty
hate
wishes
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Alice Sebold |
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f9d861a
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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.
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Alice Sebold |
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d6c1787
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Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?
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Alice Sebold |
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4632acc
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Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go
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Alice Sebold |
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c6e7f4e
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She sat in her room on the couch my parents had given up on and worked on hardening herself. Take deep breaths and hold them. Try to stay still for longer and longer periods of time. Make yourself small and like a stone. Curl the edges of yourself up and fold them under where no one can see. ~pg 29, Susie's sister Lindsey dealing with grief.
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Alice Sebold |
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5fb91bc
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A father's suspicion...' she began. Is as powerful as a mother's intuition.' ~pg 87, Ruana Singh and Jack Salmon
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Alice Sebold |
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9ee2202
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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.
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anonymity
inspirational
isolation
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Alice Sebold |
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d97199d
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I left my mark on that man.
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Alice Sebold |
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b22236a
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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
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Alice Sebold |
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03ec2bf
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People grow up by living.
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Alice Sebold |
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4f4cab6
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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..
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Alice Sebold |
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89dabc1
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All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why -- really know -- it will come.
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Alice Sebold |
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a143d37
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I watched him as he lined up the ships in bottles on his deck, bringing them over from the shelves where they usually sat. He used an old shirt of my mother's that had been ripped into rags and began dusting the shelves. Under his desk there were empty bottles- rows and rows of them we had collected for our future shipbuilding. In the closet were more ships- the ships he had built with his own father, ships he had built alone, and then thos..
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Alice Sebold |
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485cc8f
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I knew something as I watched: almost everyone was saying goodbye to me. I was becoming one of the many little-girl-losts. They would go back to their homes and put me to rest, a letter from the past never to be reopened or reread. And I could say goodbye to them, wish them well, bless them somehow for their good thoughts. A handshake in the street, a dropped item picked up and retrieved and handed back, or a friendly wave from the distant ..
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Alice Sebold |
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a10c09b
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If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.
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Alice Sebold |
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b69a5d5
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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 ple..
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Alice Sebold |
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7835895
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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.
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the-lovely-bones
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Alice Sebold |
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0dc6c79
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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.
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Alice Sebold |
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1247f29
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Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.
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Alice Sebold |
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0fa77ce
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Do you miss Susie?" Because it was dark, because Ruth was facing away from her,because Ruth was almost a stranger, Lindsey said what she felt. "More than anyone will ever know."
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Alice Sebold |
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c45d1e8
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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.
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Alice Sebold |
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f51f35d
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As she brought prospective buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag.
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Alice Sebold |
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7ac75e6
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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.
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Alice Sebold |
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e42b72c
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Every day a question mark.
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Alice Sebold |
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7b123b3
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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.
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Alice Sebold |
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378df60
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I wish you all a long and happy life
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Alice Sebold |
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5d00dd5
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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.
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Alice Sebold |
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60b8bda
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Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions
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Alice Sebold |
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3bf9d8b
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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."
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humor
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Alice Sebold |
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fd9d9f8
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At fourteen my sister sailed away from me into a place I'd never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.
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Alice Sebold |
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a149b4d
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At some point, to counter the list of the dead, I had begun keeping my own list of the living. It was something I noticed Len Fenerman did too. When he was off duty he would note the young girls and elderly women and every other female in the rainbow in between and count them among the things that sustained him. The young girl in the mall whose pale legs had grown too long for her now too-young dress and who had an aching vulnerability that..
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Alice Sebold |
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f31102b
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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 cou..
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Alice Sebold |
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c040db6
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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.
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Alice Sebold |
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f206109
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Well, as my dad would say, it means she's out of this shithole.
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Alice Sebold |
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92257de
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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?
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secret
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Alice Sebold |
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e8ddfbf
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Those clothes are Susie's,' my father said calmly when he reached him. Buckley looked down at my blackwatch dress that he held in his hand. My father stepped closer, took the dress from my brother, and then, without speaking, he gathered the rest of my clothes, which Buckley had piled on the lawn. As he turned in silence toward the house, hardly breathing, clutching my clothes to him, it sparked. I was the only one to see the colors. Just n..
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Alice Sebold |
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43016dd
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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.
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Alice Sebold |
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99a777d
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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
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family
heaven
murder
pergatory
personal-growth
rape
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Alice Sebold |
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768df81
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Everyday he got up. Before sleep wore off, he was who he used to be. Then, as his consciousness woke, it was as if poison seeped in. At first he couldn't even get up. He lay there under a heavy weight. But then only movment could save him, and he moved and he moved and he moved, no movement being enough to make up for it. The guilt on him, the hand of God pressing down on him, saying, You were not there when your daughter needed you.
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Alice Sebold |
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07ebd45
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He took the hat from my mouth. ''Tell me you love me'', he said. Gently I did. The end came anyway
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Alice Sebold |
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82559b2
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He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.
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Alice Sebold |
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23cb8d6
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Since then he had taken these photos out too many times to count, but each time he looked into the face of this woman he had felt something growing inside him. It took him a long time to realize what it was. Only recently had his wounded synapses allowed him to name it. He had been falling in love all over again. He didn't understand how two people who were married, who saw each other every day, could forget what each other looked like, bu..
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Alice Sebold |