Alice Sebold Quotes

Everybody's got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.

I think the dual existence thing is a regular pastime for all human beings, and for that matter anything in this universe.

I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.

In me the tiger sniffs the rose.

Just as we have two eyes and two feet, duality is part of life.

In every seed of good there is always a piece of bad.

Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.

Love has its place, as does hate. Peace has its place, as does war. Mercy has its place, as do cruelty and revenge.

A great amount of good is always evened out by a great amount of bad. I find it's best to acknowledge that weird balance.

While time lasts there will always be a future, and that future will hold both good and evil, since the world is made to that mingled pattern.

There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.

I have to live with both my selves as best I may.

We have our insides and our outsides, and I find the struggles between the two, as well as the occasions of harmony between the two, fascinating.

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

In my mind, we live in Heaven, and we live in Hell.

For everything that you find dreadful, there's usually something that is rather marvelous as well.

I find everything in life a little bit sad, but I also find a great deal of hope everywhere I look.

I think art should stand in its own neutral place, because I think that's how reality always is - it's this duality of being both hopeless and also full of hope.

In my experience, it's common that deep truths exist at both extremes of a dialectic, and the wisest stance on an issue will incorporate 'both of the opposites within itself.'

We have this desire for that balance between death and life or death and joy. We want to believe that something we can also have.

It's a weird dynamic - I guess there is a fine line between hope and sadness. Sometimes you can be feeling both at the same time.

I think most people's conversations are as light as they are dark. That's how life is.