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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
Horror
Window
Sex
Wall
Sailed
Blood
Fourteen
Away
Windows
Place
Walls
Never
Sister

More quotes by Alice Sebold

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When the music stopped, it could have been forever since we'd begun. My grandfather took a step back, and the light grew yellow at his back. 'I'm going,' he said. 'Where?' I asked. 'Don't worry, sweetheart. You're so close.' He turned and walked away, disappearing rapidly into spots and dust. Infinity.
Alice Sebold
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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.
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Depending on where I am in the process, sometimes I have a page count and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I have an hour count sometimes I'm just happy to string a few words together. I do keep pretty rigorous hours, because otherwise you never get anything done.
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The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy - the words on the page being sent back and forth from engaged editor to open author - is unique in my experience.
Alice Sebold
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Your first kiss is destiny knocking.
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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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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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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The sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. I think she listens, she said, too softly to be heard.
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow from the stronger one's strength.
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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.
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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He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.
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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How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home?
Alice Sebold
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Please don't let Daddy die Susie, he whispered. I need him.
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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Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.
Alice Sebold
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I dont think ignorance is a way that you gain distance on something.
Alice Sebold