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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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Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Talk
Ruling
Sound
Author
Process
Narrative
Character
Ultimately
Hard
Obviously
Like
Sounds
Characters
Control

More quotes by 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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He took the hat from my mouth. ''Tell me you love me'', he said. Gently I did. The end came anyway
Alice Sebold
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Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.
Alice Sebold
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I missed her then but it was an odd sort of missing because by then, I knew the meaning of forever.
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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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I'm just a friendly bystander who they occasionally ask questions of. That's my level of involvement.
Alice Sebold
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To transform experience and thought into language and narrative - that is beautiful even if that beauty is in brokenness.
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.
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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I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines.
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.
Alice Sebold
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A father's suspicion...' she began. Is as powerful as a mother's intuition.' ~pg 87, Ruana Singh and Jack Salmon
Alice Sebold
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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.
Alice Sebold
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I'm not a slash-and-burn kind, and I'm also not a posterity kind. They just kind of exist on my hard drive. It's like walking down the street - what you leave behind is still there, even if you never go back and revisit it.
Alice Sebold
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There was one thing my murderer didn't understand he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.
Alice Sebold
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Nothing is ever certain.
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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She sat in her room on the couch my parents had given up on and worked on hardening herself. Take deep breaths and hold them. Try to stay still for longer and longer periods of time. Make yourself small and like a stone. Curl the edges of yourself up and fold them under where no one can see. ~pg 29, Susie's sister Lindsey dealing with grief.
Alice Sebold
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These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors. She kept an honor code with her journals and her poems. 'Inside, inside,' she would whisper quietly to herself when she felt the urge to tell.
Alice Sebold