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a1464f5
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The sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. "I think she listens," she said, too softly to be heard."
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Alice Sebold |
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c34efb6
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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?
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relationships
relatives
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Alice Sebold |
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5832b72
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We stood-- the dead child and the living --on either side of my father, both wanting the same thing. To have him to ourselves forever. To please us both was an impossibility.
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Alice Sebold |
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4f072d0
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If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling, you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth.
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Alice Sebold |
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ec22c35
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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
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Alice Sebold |
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bc108ca
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I realized then that they would not know when I was gone, just as they could not know how heavily I hovered in a particular room. Buckley had talked to me and I had talked back. Even if I hadn't thought I'd been talking to him. I had. I became manifest in whatever way they wanted me to be. 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..
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Alice Sebold |
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ad80442
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Lindsey and I would lie down on the floor underneath it. I would pretend to be the knight that was pictured, and Holiday was the faithful dog curled up at his feet. Lindsey would be the wife he'd left behind. It always dissolved into giggles no matter how solemn the start. Lindsey would tell the dead knight that a wife had to move on, that she couldn't be trapped for the rest of her life by a man who was frozen in time. .... "You're dead, k..
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Alice Sebold |
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7214c95
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Occasionally my mother called from California. My parents had hurried and difficult conversations. She asked after Buckley and Linsey and Holiday. She asked how the house was holded up and whether there was anything he needed to tell her. 'We still miss you,' he said in December 1977, when the leaves had all fallen and been blown or raked away but even still, with the ground waiting to recieve it, there had been no snow. 'I know that,' she ..
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Alice Sebold |
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6022903
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At Evensong one night, while Holly played at sax and Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer joined in, I saw him: Holiday, racing past a fluffy white Samoyed. He had lived to a ripe old age on earth and slept at my father's feet after my mother left, never wanting to let him out of his sight... I waited for him to sniff me out, anxious to know if here, on the other side, I would still be the little girl he slept beside. I did not have to wait long: he was so..
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Alice Sebold |
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08bdb31
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Look what happens when we dream.
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Alice Sebold |
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022fa9d
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She had a stare that stretched to infinity. She was, in that moment, not my mother but something separate from me.
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Alice Sebold |
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959cc6b
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Stones and bones; snow and frost; seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Daddy misses!
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Alice Sebold |
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93f54a2
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She was unaware that she was somewhat of a celebrity up in heaven. I had told people about her, what she did, how she observed moments of silence up and down the city and wrote small individual prayers in her journal, and the story had travelled so quickly that women lined up to know she had found where they'd been killed. She had fans in heaven..... Meanwhile, for us, she was doing important work, work that most people on Earth were too fr..
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Alice Sebold |
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d633406
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I wondered if this longing in a three-year-old had sparked what came at eight. That fuzzy feeling of difference, that her crushes on female teachers or her cousin were more real than the other girls' crushes. Hers contained a desire beyond sweetness and attention, it fed a longing, beginning to flower green and yellow into a crocuslike lust, the soft petals opening into her awkward adolescence. It was not so much, she would write in her jou..
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Alice Sebold |
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d20cc56
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By the time I was eighteen, she had sat me down and detailed her alcoholism, its onset and aftermath. She believed that by sharing such things I might be able to avoid them or, if need be, recognize them when they occurred. By talking about them to her children, she was also acknowledging that they were real and that they had an effect on us too, that things like this shaped a family, not just the person they happened to.
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Alice Sebold |
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68eeaf0
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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.
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Alice Sebold |
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6d7f6db
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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.
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Alice Sebold |
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2aa829b
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No one on the street thought anything of the downtown girl dressed in black who had paused in the middle of midtown foot traffic. In her art student camouflage she could walk the entire length of Manhattan and, if not blend in, be classified and therefore ignored.
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Alice Sebold |
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c97e486
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Placing blame was easier than adding up the mounting figures of what he'd lost.
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revenge
fatigue
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Alice Sebold |
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49a96f6
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She thought of sex as the Star Trek transport.You vaporized and found yourself navigating another planet within the second or two it took to realign.
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Alice Sebold |
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dfe0331
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Mi madre era eterna como la luna. Viva o muerta, la madre o la ausencia de la madre siempre determina la vida de una persona"."
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Alice Sebold |
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4ac7305
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She could shut out the whole world, including herself.
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Alice Sebold |
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1273043
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About Grandma Lynn: She was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. At seventy, she had come to believe in time alone.
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Alice Sebold |
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81f0851
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She told her journal about me passing by her in the parking lot, about how on that night I had touched her-literally, she felt it, reached out. What I had looked like then. How she dreamed about me. How she had fashioned the idea that a spirit could be a sort of second skin for someone, a protective layer somehow. How maybe if she was assiduous she could free us both. I would read over her shoulder as she wrote down her thoughts and wonder ..
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Alice Sebold |
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a4800b0
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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.
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individuality
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Alice Sebold |
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d9a2058
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Samuel walked out to Lindsey then, and there she was in his arms, my sweet butterball babe, born ten years after my fourteen years on Earth: Abigail Suzanne. Little Susie to me. Samuel placed Susie on a blanket near the flowers. And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.
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the-lovely-bones
quotes
novel
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Alice Sebold |
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04ef4b8
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By December 1975, a year had passed since Mr. Harvey had packed his bags, but there was still no sign of him. For a while, until the tape dirtied or the paper tore, store owners kept a scratchy sketch of him taped to their windows. Lindsey and Samuel walked in the neighboorhood or hung out at Hal's bike shop. She wouldn't go to the diner where the other kids went. The owner of the diner was a law and order man. He had blown up the sketch of..
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Alice Sebold |
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7936899
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After a few days in heaven, I realized that the javelin-throwers and the shot-putters and the boys who played basketball on the cracked blacktop were all in their own version of heaven. Theirs just fit with mine- didn't duplicate it precisely, but had a lot of the same things going on inside. ~pg 17
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Alice Sebold |
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536372e
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She climbed down the cliffs after tying her sweater loosely around her waist. Down below she could see nothing but jagged rocks and waves. She was creful, but I watched her feet more than the view she saw- I worried about her slipping. 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 over again. Or ..
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Alice Sebold |
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563d156
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At nearly two months,the idea of it as news was fading in the hearts of all but my family-and Ruth
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Alice Sebold |
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f4fde81
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You don't notice the dead leaving when they really hoose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down.
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Alice Sebold |
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5bfdead
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Heaven wasn't perfect.
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Alice Sebold |
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ebc7e23
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When they reached the lobby and the doors opened I knew they were meant to be there, the four of them, alone.
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Alice Sebold |
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76b94de
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Above his bed the clock ticked off the minutes and I thought of the game Lindsey and I had played in the yard together: "he loves me/he loves me not" picked out on daisy's petals. I could hear the clock casting my own two greatest wishes back to me in the same rhythm: "Die for me/don't die for me, die for me/don't die for me." I could not help myself, it seemed, as I tore at his weakening heart. If he died, I would have him forever. Was thi..
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Alice Sebold |
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d2927e0
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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.
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Alice Sebold |
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97e41ab
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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.
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rape
survival
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Alice Sebold |
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b15db6e
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I now think that was distanced me from Tricia and from the Rape Crisis Center was their use of generalities. I did not want to be one of a group or compared with others. It somehow blindsided my sense that I was going to survive. Tricia prepared me for failure by saying that it would be okay if I failed. She did this by showing me that the odds out there were against me. But what she told me, I didn't want to hear. In the face of dismal sta..
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rape-survivor
therapy
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Alice Sebold |
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8f8b68c
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One day, Buckley came home from the second grade with a story he'd written: "Once upon a time there was a kid named Billy. He liked to explore. He saw a hole and went inside but he never came out. The End."
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i-do-not-know-waht-to-tag
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Alice Sebold |
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e279f62
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My mother gave Lindsey a meaningful look. 'We are not discussing this further. You can go up to your room and wait or wait with me. Your choice.' Lindsey was dumbfounded. She stared at our mother and knew what she wanted most: to flee, to run out into the cornfield where my father was, where I was, where she felt suddenly that the heart of her family had moved. But Buckley wtood warm against her. ~pg 143; Lindsey, Buckley and Mom
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Alice Sebold |
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9c047bd
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I had been kissed once by someone I liked. His name was Ray and he was Indian. He had an accent and was dark. I wasn't supposed to like him. Clarissa called his large eyes, with their half closed lids, "freak-a-delic," but he was nice and smart and helped me cheat on my algebra exam while pretending he hadn't. He kissed me by my locker the day before we turned in our photos for the yearbook. When the yearbook came out at the end of the summ..
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Alice Sebold |
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f7e3371
|
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...
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Alice Sebold |
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682cb31
|
I would do what I did best, I thought. I would wait. It was only a matter of time, after all.
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Alice Sebold |
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a78910e
|
Exactly,' she said, and made her point as simply as that. There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven. ~pg 8
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Alice Sebold |
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2eea24a
|
I knew my mother's limitations because they formed the marrow of my bones.
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Alice Sebold |