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d00d434
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Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.
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mother
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Alice Sebold |
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cfc758d
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I watched my beautiful sister running . . . and I knew she was not running away from me or toward me. Like someone who has survived a gut-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a scar for eight long years.
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Alice Sebold |
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cd23238
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Please don't let Daddy die Susie," he whispered. "I need him."
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Alice Sebold |
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918984f
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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...
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Alice Sebold |
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c4989e6
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When I was raped I lost my virginity and almost lost my life. I also discarded certain assumptions I had held about how the world worked and about how safe I was.
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Alice Sebold |
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52820d2
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As I watched my family sip champagne, I thought about how their lives trailed backward and forward from my death and then, I saw, as Samuel took the daring step of kissing Lindsey in a room full of family, became borne aloft away from it.
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Alice Sebold |
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532e300
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Like snowflakes,' Franny said,'none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before
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Alice Sebold |
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56647e7
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He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.
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death
inspirational
loss
love
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Alice Sebold |
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4e30351
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The earth has a mouth?" Buckley asked. A big round mouth but with no lips," my father said. Jack," my mother said, laughing, "stop it. Do you know I caught him outside growling at the snapdragons?"
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Alice Sebold |
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37a1105
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He tunneled into stories where weak men changed into strong half-animals or used eye beams or magic hammers to power through steel or climb up the sides of skyscrapers. He was the Hulk when angry and Spidey the rest of the time. When he felt his heart hurt he turned into something stronger than a little boy, and he grew up this way. A heart that flashed from heart to stone, heart to stone. As I watched I thought of what Grandma Lynn liked t..
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Alice Sebold |
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5e74494
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Hold still," my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me."
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father-daughter
mast
ship
ship-building
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Alice Sebold |
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089b41e
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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.
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Alice Sebold |
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c0dbeb2
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In the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway
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Alice Sebold |
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2430676
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When the music stopped, it could have been forever since we'd begun. My grandfather 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.
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Alice Sebold |
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710063a
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Inside the room it was dark now, the florescent light behind my father flickering so slightly it lit only the most obvious masses in the room. My sister was in a chair pulled up alongside the bed, her head resting on the side of it with her hand extended out to touch my father. My father, deep under, was lying on his back. My mother could not know that I was there with them, that here were the four of us, so changed now from the days when s..
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Alice Sebold |
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88a8068
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Just that winter she had found herself saying to a young woman who worked with her at the tasting bar on Saturdays that 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,' she'd pleaded. The girl looked at her blankly. But for my mother what mattered was that as she spoke, she had suddenly identified herself as the weaker one. This revelatio..
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Alice Sebold |
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47d9c74
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My grandmother stepped back into the kitchen to get their drinks. I had come to love her more after death than I ever had on Earth. I wish I could say that in that moment in the kitchen she decided to quit drinking, but I now saw that drinking was a part of what made her who she was. If the worst of what she left on Earth was a legacy of inebriated support, it was a good legacy in my book. ~Susie's grandmother, Lynn pgs 315-316
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Alice Sebold |
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479c62f
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It was then that I slipped in the darkness, unable to know if I could be seen. I made myself small in the darkness, unable to know if I could be seen. I had left for hours every day for eight and a half years as I had left my mother or Ruth and Ray, my brother and sister, and certainly Mr. Harvey, but he, I now saw had never left me. His devotion to me had made me know again and again that I had been beloved. In the warm light of my father'..
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Alice Sebold |
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e4a25d8
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When he felt his heart hurt he turned into something stronger than a little boy, and he grew up this way. A heart that flashed from heart to strone, heart to stone.
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Alice Sebold |
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ec031cc
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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."
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Alice Sebold |
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0615c97
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My life was over; my life had just begun.
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Alice Sebold |
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5a5da61
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Lindsey took my father's hand and watched his face for movement. My sister was growing up before my eyes. I listened as she whispered the words he had sung to the two of us before Buckley was born: Stones and bones; snow and frost seeds and beansand polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all who knowwho Daddy misses! His two little frogs of girls, that's who. They know where they are, do you, do you? When her eyes closed and they b..
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Alice Sebold |
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38fa3ee
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Do you ever think of her?' she asked. They were quiet again. All the time,' Ruth said. A chill ran down my spine. 'Sometimes I think she's lucky, you know. I hate this place.' Me too,' Ray said. 'But I've lived other places. This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one.' You're not implying...' She's in heaven, if you believe in that stuff.' You don't?' I don't think so, no.' I do,' Ruth said. 'I don't mean la-la angel wing crap, but..
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Alice Sebold |
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7f803b6
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The helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human-- feeling as you went-- groping in corners and opening your arms to light-- all of it part of navigating the unknown.
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Alice Sebold |
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ca2c104
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I was like I was in science class: I was curious.
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science
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Alice Sebold |
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8d4b09c
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memory could save, that it had power, that it was often the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed, or the brutalized.
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Alice Sebold |
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70c531c
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It was late in Ruana and Ray's visit when Samuel started talking about the gothic revival house that Lindsey and he had found along an overgrown section of Route 30. As he told Abigail about it in detail, describing how he had realized he wanted to propose to Lindsey and live there with her, Ray found himself asking, "Does it have a big hole in the ceiling of the back room and cool windows above the front door?" "Yes," Samuel said, as my f..
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Alice Sebold |
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4b33bff
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Ruth hadn't talked to my sister since before my death, and then it was only to excuse herself in the hallway at school. But she'd seen Lindsey walking home with Samuel and seen her smile with him. She watched as my sister said yes to pancakes and no to everything else. She had tried to imagine herself being my sister as she had spent time imagining being me.
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Alice Sebold |
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2c8dbd7
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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.
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Alice Sebold |
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8369a12
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At the tips of the feathers there is air and at their base: blood. I hold up bones; I wish like broken glass they could court light....still I try to place these pieces back together, to set them firm, to make murdered girls live again.
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Alice Sebold |
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216db98
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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.
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Alice Sebold |
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d8aca8c
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And i was gone.
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Alice Sebold |
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42c369b
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Horror on earth is real and it is everyday. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
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horror
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Alice Sebold |
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39d3225
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Stones and bones; snow and frost; seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Susie misses...
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Alice Sebold |
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5031a38
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My name was Salmon like the fish, first name Susie.
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Alice Sebold |
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ee4f5dd
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My father had not been outside the house except to drive back and forth to work or sit out in the backyard, for months, nor had he seen his neighbors. Now he looked at them, from face to face, until he realized I had been loved by people he didn't even recognize. His heart filled up, warm again as it had not been in what seemed so long to him- save small forgotten moments with Buckley, the accidents of love that happened with his son. ~pgs..
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Alice Sebold |
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e8ff0c7
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Sometimes Holly seemed like she wasn't paying attention, and other times she was gone when I went looking for her. That was when she went to a part of heaven we didn't share. I missed her then, but it was and odd sort of missing because by then I knew the meaning of forever. I could not have what I wanted most: Mr. Harvey dead and me living. Heaven wasn't perfect. But I came to believe that if I watched closely, and desired, I might change..
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Alice Sebold |
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6d7b3fa
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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.
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Alice Sebold |
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756aa34
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But I know I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead -- in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death -- the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human -- feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light - all of it part of navigating the unknown.
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Alice Sebold |
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db34294
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As if in the other side of his kiss there could ve a new life
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Alice Sebold |
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ef497b1
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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.
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Alice Sebold |
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9a78b01
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Like a medical procedure,' Ruth said. 'Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet.
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Alice Sebold |
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1771afe
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It was Buckley, as my father and sister joined the group and listened to Grandma Lynn's countless toasts, who saw me. He saw me standing under the rustic colonial clock and stared. He was drinking champagne. There were strings coming out from all around me, reaching out, waving in the air. Someone passed him a brownie. He held it in his hand but did not eat. He saw my shape and face, which had not changed-the hair still parted down the midd..
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Alice Sebold |
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b1de075
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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.
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Alice Sebold |