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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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Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Made
Areas
Moved
Tess
Learned
Inhabited
Woman
Weirdness
Experience
Proudly
Around
Distinct
Firsts
Conformity
First
Display

More quotes by Alice Sebold

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Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions
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Loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman.
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She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was.
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There’s no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.
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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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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.
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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.
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Well, as my dad would say, it means she’s out of this shithole.
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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
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Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.
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My name is Salmon, like the fish first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.
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Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.
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