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

More quotes by 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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Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.
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Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go
Alice Sebold
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Since then I've always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.
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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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I have always felt extremely weird. But I am very happy with my weirdnesses, and I want other people to be very happy with theirs.
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 fell in love with you again While you were away - Jack Salmon
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Your first kiss is destiny knocking.
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.
Alice Sebold
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What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.
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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Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.
Alice Sebold
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Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.
Alice Sebold
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Loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman.
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.
Alice Sebold
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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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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
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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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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