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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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Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Desire
Understand
Come
Enough
Really

More quotes by Alice Sebold

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What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child
Alice Sebold
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I wake up very early in the morning. I like to start in the dark, and I never work at night, because my brain is evaporated by 4 p.m.
Alice Sebold
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I forgive you, I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.
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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And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.
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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When I was raped I lost my virginity and almost lost my life. I also discarded certain assumptions I had held about how the world worked and about how safe I was.
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.
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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She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything.
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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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
Alice Sebold
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I would do exactly what you are doing: I would talk to everyone I needed to, I would not tell too many people his name. When I was sure, she said, I would find a quiet way, and I would kill him.
Alice Sebold
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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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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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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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Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.
Alice Sebold
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I would like to tell you that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe.
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