Alice Sebold Quotes

I stand in this parking lot, realizing that I’ve never been this far from home, and here is this girl I love and cannot follow. I hope this is the hero’s errand, because not following her is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

So, my sweetheart back home writes to me and wants to know what this gal in Bombay's got that she hasn't got. So I just write back to her and says, Nothin', honey. Only she's got it here.

The lonely wanderer, who watches by the seashore the waves that roll between him and his home, talks of cruel facts, material barriers that, just because they are material, and not ideal, shall be the irresistible foes of his longing heart.

Absence - that common cure of love.

I was gutted to leave my boyfriend at home when I started my tour, but taking my pillow was like taking a little bit of him with me.

The game isn't the same when we're apart.

I was in a long-distance relationship. There's a lot of heartache in distance, and in proximity - those ideas you have when you're next to someone who you haven't seen in a month.

Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain. I love you still among these cold things. Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels that cross the sea towards no arrival. I see myself forgotten like those old anchors. The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there. My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose. I love what I do not have. You are so far. My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights. But night comes and starts to sing to me.

Making my way downtown, walking fast, faces pass, and I'm home bound. Staring blankly ahead, just making my way, making a way, through the crowd. And I need you, and I miss you, and now I wonder... If I could fall, into the sky. do you think time, would pass me by? 'Cause you know I'd walk a thousand miles, if I could, just see you tonight.

The truth is that you can divide your heart in all sorts of interesting ways - a little here, a little there, most banked at home, some of it coined out for a flutter. But love cleaves through the mind's mathematics. Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be. How will you heal your heart when love has split it in two?

I know I must conceal my sentiments: I must smother hope; I must remember that he cannot care much for me. For when I say that I am of his kind, I do not mean that I have his force to influence, and his spell to attract: I mean only that I have certain tastes and feelings in common with him.I must, then, repeat continually that we are forever sundered: - and yet, while I breathe and think, I must love him.

Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing--that was me.

Part of me aches at the thought of her being so close yet so untouchable.

I'd rather go on hearing your lies, than to go on living without you.

I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.

Did you love well what very soon you left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache. Never so full, I never was bereft so utterly. The winter evenings drift dark to the window. Not one work will make you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake from your night toward me. The only gift I got to keep or give is what I've cried, floodgates let down to mourning for the dead chances, for the end of being young, for everyone I loved who really died. I drank our one year out in brine instead of honey from the seasons of your tongue.

I think living with the absence of someone we love is like living in front of a mountain from which a person - a speck in the distance, on some distance ridge - is perpetually waving.

It's an incredible feeling falling in love someone who doesn't know you exist.

I'm tired of having to hide my feelings about the person I care about. About the person I love.

The celebrations Of secret nonmeetings are empty, Unspoken conversations, Unuttered words. Glances that don't intersect Don't know where to come to rest. And only the tears rejoice Because they can flow and flow. Sweetbrier around Moscow, Alas! Somehow it is here ... And all this they will call Love eternal.

You know, when one's in love,' I said, 'and things go all wrong, one's terribly unhappy and one thinks one won't ever get over it. But you'll be astounded to learn what the sea will do.' What do you mean?' she smiled. Well, love isn't a good sailor and it languishes on a sea voyage. You'll be surprised when you have the Atlantic between you and Larry to find how slight the pang is that before you sailed seemed intolerable.

The absence of the beloved, short though it may last, always lasts too long.