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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
Thinking
Form
Novel
Firsts
Longer
Book
Particular
Grapple
Come
Quite
Substitute
First
Lines
Substitutes
Trying
Books
Novels
Things
Difficult
Explain
Think
Sense
Line

More quotes by Alice Sebold

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I don't do much public speaking. I did a lot of stuff for Bones, and then ended up having said yes to a lot of things that kept me on the road for a while for that, but then I pretty much stopped. I'm touring for this book, but when the tour is done, that'll be the end of it.
Alice Sebold
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You look invincible,' my mother said one night. I loved these times, when we seemed to feel the same thing. I turned to her, wrapped in my thin gown, and said: I am.
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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.
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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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I watched my beautiful sister running . . . and I knew she was not running away from me or toward me. Like someone who has survived a gut-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a scar for eight long years.
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The living deserve attention, too
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Like a medical procedure,' Ruth said. 'Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet.
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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
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I loved the way the burned-out flashcubes of the Kodak Instamatic marked a moment that had passed, one that would now be gone forever except for a picture.
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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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I was like I was in science class: I was curious.
Alice Sebold
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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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Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.
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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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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Part of the creative process for me is an invitation for readers to follow their imagination.
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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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Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.
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
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I would like to tell you that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe.
Alice Sebold