Quote

He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.

Alice Sebold

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Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Children
Clarity
Things
Lived
Life
Worst
Child
Moment
Woman
Moments
Two

More quotes by Alice Sebold

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Like a medical procedure,' Ruth said. 'Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet.
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I'm fine with whatever comes my way, and whatever doesn't come my way I'm fine with too. I have a very laissez-faire attitude with the whole thing.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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Well, as my dad would say, it means she’s out of this shithole.
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I'm just a friendly bystander who they occasionally ask questions of. That's my level of involvement.
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I would like to tell you that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe.
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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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After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury hurled directly at me for reasons I remain unsure of.
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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.
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Since then I've always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.
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I was in the air around him. I was in the cold mornings he had now. I was in the quiet time he spent alone. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. -Susie Salmon
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Do you miss Susie? Because it was dark, because Ruth was facing away from her,because Ruth was almost a stranger, Lindsey said what she felt. More than anyone will ever know.
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He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.
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You save yourself or you remain unsaved.
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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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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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What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.
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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.
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