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The earth has a mouth?” Buckley asked. A big round mouth but with no lips,” my father said. Jack,” my mother said, laughing, “stop it. Do you know I caught him outside growling at the snapdragons?

Alice Sebold

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Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Outside
Jack
Laughing
Round
Stop
Rounds
Bigs
Mouth
Father
Mouths
Mother
Lips
Earth
Caught
Asked
Growling

More quotes by Alice Sebold

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Last night it had been my father who had finally said it: She’s never coming home. A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it.
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The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.
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At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.
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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.
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My name is Salmon, like the fish first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.
Alice Sebold
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I mean, if I went into my closet, I could find a previous draft and try to figure that out, but it takes a long time for me to find the voice to tell a story in. I was working from other points of view for a couple years there.
Alice Sebold
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To transform experience and thought into language and narrative - that is beautiful even if that beauty is in brokenness.
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She didn't even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house--it was the eyes, her dancer's carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.
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I loved the way the burned-out flashcubes of the Kodak Instamatic marked a moment that had passed, one that would now be gone forever except for a picture.
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The living deserve attention, too
Alice Sebold
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Books and novels in particular that grapple with quite a few things are difficult to explain, so I think that first line can come in a substitute for trying to form a longer sense of what the book is about.
Alice Sebold
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A father's suspicion...' she began. Is as powerful as a mother's intuition.' ~pg 87, Ruana Singh and Jack Salmon
Alice Sebold
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Please don't let Daddy die Susie, he whispered. I need him.
Alice Sebold
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And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.
Alice Sebold
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I'm not a slash-and-burn kind, and I'm also not a posterity kind. They just kind of exist on my hard drive. It's like walking down the street - what you leave behind is still there, even if you never go back and revisit it.
Alice Sebold
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She sat in her room on the couch my parents had given up on and worked on hardening herself. Take deep breaths and hold them. Try to stay still for longer and longer periods of time. Make yourself small and like a stone. Curl the edges of yourself up and fold them under where no one can see. ~pg 29, Susie's sister Lindsey dealing with grief.
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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You save yourself or you remain unsaved.
Alice Sebold
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But also I wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was granted one weak grace. Back in the room where the green chair was still warm from his body, I blew that lonely, flickering candle out
Alice Sebold
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If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.
Alice Sebold