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The living deserve attention, too

Alice Sebold

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Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Living
Deserve
Attention

More quotes by Alice Sebold

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The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her she had noted in her journal: booze affects material as it does people.
Alice Sebold
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He had been my almost. My might-have-been. I was afraid of what I wanted most - His kiss. Still, I collected kiss stories. -Susie Salmon
Alice Sebold
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I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.
Alice Sebold
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You look invincible,' my mother said one night. I loved these times, when we seemed to feel the same thing. I turned to her, wrapped in my thin gown, and said: I am.
Alice Sebold
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All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why -- really know -- it will come.
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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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?
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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But I know I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead — in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death — the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human — feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light - all of it part of navigating the unknown.
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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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 him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.
Alice Sebold
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I don't do much public speaking. I did a lot of stuff for Bones, and then ended up having said yes to a lot of things that kept me on the road for a while for that, but then I pretty much stopped. I'm touring for this book, but when the tour is done, that'll be the end of it.
Alice Sebold
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Loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman.
Alice Sebold
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As if in the other side of his kiss there could ve a new life
Alice Sebold
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It's very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.
Alice Sebold
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I wanted to be the moron of the family, because morons seemed to have more fun, more freedom and more personality.
Alice Sebold
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I think you only learn what kind of personality you have by committing to things.
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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Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.
Alice Sebold
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One thing about failing repeatedly: If you're still doing it after you've failed that much, you really mean it.
Alice Sebold