Quotes By Author: alice sebold
“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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“He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.”
“I forgive you,” I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.”
“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.”
“My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.”
“Heaven is comfort, but it’s still not living.”
“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.”
“Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.”