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I think you only learn what kind of personality you have by committing to things.

Alice Sebold

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Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Committing
Personality
Learn
Kind
Things
Think
Thinking

More quotes by Alice Sebold

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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.
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 mean, if I went into my closet, I could find a previous draft and try to figure that out, but it takes a long time for me to find the voice to tell a story in. I was working from other points of view for a couple years there.
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.
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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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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But also I wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was granted one weak grace. Back in the room where the green chair was still warm from his body, I blew that lonely, flickering candle out
Alice Sebold
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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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Part of the creative process for me is an invitation for readers to follow their imagination.
Alice Sebold
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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.
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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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 left my mark on that man.
Alice Sebold
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You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any other girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate.
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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When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things, Franny said. What about the dead? I asked. Where do we go?
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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Stones and bones snow and frost seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Daddy misses! His two little frogs of girls, that’s who. They know where they are, do you, do you?
Alice Sebold
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I have never been shy about listening to the input of others and weighing it seriously.
Alice Sebold
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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