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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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Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Blood
Fourteen
Away
Windows
Place
Walls
Never
Sister
Horror
Window
Sex
Wall
Sailed

More quotes by Alice Sebold

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Nothing is ever certain.
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Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?
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At the tips of the feathers there is air and at their base: blood. I hold up bones I wish like broken glass they could court light....still I try to place these pieces back together, to set them firm, to make murdered girls live again.
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Last night it had been my father who had finally said it: She’s never coming home. A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it.
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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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If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.
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And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.
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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. Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was immaculate anonymity.
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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.
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I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found how to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.
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It's very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.
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I think that if you're somebody who's a control freak, the process would make you crazy, but I'm kind of a process freak, so I'm excited to see what he does with it. I know it's not going to be my book, so just starting with that knowledge frees me from having to get all freaked out about it.
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How to Commit the Perfect Murder was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.
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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.
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As she brought prospective buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag.
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The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.
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but, he also said it because part of him wanted more of her, this cold woman who was not exactly cold, this rock who was not stone.
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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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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.
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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