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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

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Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Eyes
Eye
Whole
Make
Would
Shut
Time
Disappear
Believed
Present

More quotes by Alice Sebold

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No one on the street thought anything of the downtown girl dressed in black who had paused in the middle of midtown foot traffic. In her art student camouflage she could walk the entire length of Manhattan and, if not blend in, be classified and therefore ignored.
Alice Sebold
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But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone. ~pg 254
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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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.
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
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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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I had always been in love with him. I counted the lashes of each closed eye. He had been my almost, my might have been, and I did not want to leave him
Alice Sebold
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Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.
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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I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand
Alice Sebold
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I left my mark on that man.
Alice Sebold
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The moon is whole all the time, but we can’t always see it. What we see is an almost moon or not-quite moon. The rest is hiding just out of view, but there’s only one moon, so we follow it in the sky. We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides.
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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Every day a question mark.
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 tried to take solace in Holiday, our dog. I missed him in a way I hadn't yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again it might sound silly but I didn't believe it, would not believe it.
Alice Sebold
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Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun it cannot be contained.
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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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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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