Alice Sebold
I like gardening - it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.Collection: Gardening
The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy - the words on the page being sent back and forth from engaged editor to open author - is unique in my experience.
I wanted to be the moron of the family, because morons seemed to have more fun, more freedom and more personality.
I wake up very early in the morning. I like to start in the dark, and I never work at night, because my brain is evaporated by 4 P.M.
Depending on where I am in the process, sometimes I have a page count and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I have an hour count; sometimes I'm just happy to string a few words together. I do keep pretty rigorous hours, because otherwise you never get anything done.
It's hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you're ultimately the author, so you do have control.
I think it's an interesting thing to me, because we have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things.
I always had that sense of being censored for the things that I thought. Why is it wrong to embroider your pants, or paint with acrylics on your clothing? Why is that weird? Isn't it weirder to want to be like everyone else?
I find talking about my work harder than it might be if honesty wasn't my calling card.
I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't.
For me, heaven would be a lack of alienation. The whole time I was growing up, I felt comfort was inherently evil. I think that, for me, heaven isn't about couches and milk shakes and never having a troubling thought again.
I wanted to be a novelist for so long.
I don't think ignorance is a way that you gain distance on something.
I think understanding is the way to gain perspective - and therefore can live among those hideous realities. You can live with them.
I have always felt extremely weird. But I am very happy with my weirdnesses, and I want other people to be very happy with theirs.
To me, the idea of heaven would give you certain pleasures, certain joys - but it's very important to have an intellectual understanding of why you want those things.
I went to church irregularly and was mostly reading comics in the pew.
In my 20s, I railed against anything 'spiritual'; I thought it was all crap.
I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.
I think you only learn what kind of personality you have by committing to things.
We all work hard to understand the dynamic relationship we have with a parent.
I'm gradually working through my obsessions, and maybe, when they're all free and clear, I'll write a comedy. But I'm not there yet.
I have never been shy about listening to the input of others and weighing it seriously.
You save yourself or you remain unsaved.Collection: Save Yourself
I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my handCollection: Lying
Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.Collection: Inspiring
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.Collection: Beautiful
Your first kiss is destiny knocking.Collection: Kissing
Since then I've always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse; rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.Collection: Mean
Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.Collection: Life
I was trying to prove to them and to myself that I was still who I had always been. I was beautiful, if fat. I was smart, if loud. I was good, if ruined.Collection: Beautiful
Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.Collection: Men
Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.Collection: Heaven
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Lovely
If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.Collection: Eye
Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?Collection: Long Ago
I fell in love with you again; While you were away - Jack SalmonCollection: Love You
How to Commit the Perfect Murder" was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.Collection: Games
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.Collection: Pain
To transform experience and thought into language and narrative - that is beautiful even if that beauty is in brokenness.Collection: Beautiful
We have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things. So it made sense to me to reflect the human condition that not every action has an explanation. We act, and then later maybe come to an understanding about it, or maybe not.Collection: People
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.Collection: Firsts
Nothing is ever certain.Collection: Death
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 window, a nod, a smile, a moment when the eyes lock over the antics of a child.Collection: Girl
I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines.Collection: Hair
I forgive you," I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.Collection: Real
I wish you all a long and happy lifeCollection: Happy Life
Every day a question mark.Collection: Mark
"When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things," Franny said. "What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?"Collection: Done