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Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow from the stronger one's strength.

Alice Sebold

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Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Broken
Strength
Found
Together
Needing
Way
Borrow
Never
Touching
Stronger
Usually

More quotes by Alice Sebold

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There was our father, the heart we knew held all of us. Held us heavily and desperately, the doors of his heart opening and closing with the rapidity of stops on an instrument, the quiet felt closures, the ghostly fingering, practice and practice and then, incredibly, sound and melody and warmth.
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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So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything.
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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.
Alice Sebold
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Loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman.
Alice Sebold
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Those who say they would rather fight to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped a thousand times. You do what you have to.
Alice Sebold
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He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see a figure standing at the end of thier bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus.
Alice Sebold
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I'm just a friendly bystander who they occasionally ask questions of. That's my level of involvement.
Alice Sebold
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I like gardening - it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.
Alice Sebold
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Stones and bones snow and frost seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Daddy misses! His two little frogs of girls, that’s who. They know where they are, do you, do you?
Alice Sebold
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Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.
Alice Sebold
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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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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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Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.
Alice Sebold
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Well, as my dad would say, it means she’s out of this shithole.
Alice Sebold
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There was one thing my murderer didn't understand he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.
Alice Sebold
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I was like I was in science class: I was curious.
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