“ 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… Alice Sebold
“ 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 da… Alice Sebold
“ I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind of re… Alice Sebold
“ 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 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 com… Alice Sebold
“ 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 wai… Alice Sebold
“ Try to breathe," he said, and for the first time the only thought in my head after an instruction like that wasn't Fuck you.I breathed. Alice Sebold
“ 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 h… Alice Sebold
“ 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… Alice Sebold
“ Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them. Alice Sebold
“ 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. Alice Sebold
