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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.

Alice Sebold

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Alice Sebold
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 6
Novelist
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Trying
Books
Novels
Things
Difficult
Explain
Think
Sense
Line
Thinking
Form
Novel
Firsts
Longer
Book
Particular
Grapple
Come
Quite
Substitute
First
Lines
Substitutes

More quotes by Alice Sebold

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Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.
Alice Sebold
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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
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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I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.
Alice Sebold
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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.
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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Well, it's my voice, so it's more accessible that way, and there are also all sorts of things like plot and timelines that are already known entities, so for me, it's very different from writing fiction.
Alice Sebold
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Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions
Alice Sebold
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Every day a question mark.
Alice Sebold
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I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand
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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She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was.
Alice Sebold
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The living deserve attention, too
Alice Sebold
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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.
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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When I was raped I lost my virginity and almost lost my life. I also discarded certain assumptions I had held about how the world worked and about how safe I was.
Alice Sebold
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There’s no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.
Alice Sebold
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I wanted to be the moron of the family, because morons seemed to have more fun, more freedom and more personality.
Alice Sebold
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I dont think ignorance is a way that you gain distance on something.
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