The Lovely Bones Quotes
"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered."
"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way."
"I wasn't killed by Mr. Botte, by the way. Don't think every person you're going to meet in here is suspect."
"It was a gift to me, and even if I didn't get what I wanted, I got what I needed."
"There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven."
"Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had."
"I was in my heaven by that time, fitting my limbs together."
"The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them."
"In every piece of glass, in every shard and sliver, I cast my face."
"The truth was that the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred."
"Sometimes I think clues find their way in good time."
"I could visualize it so well my butt would sting."
"You have lost a daughter and come here for some purpose."
"I would find a quiet way, and I would kill him."
"Horrible things happen close to home, to people we know."
"You can stop now. We'll just lie here and wait until things quiet down."
"How to Commit the Perfect Murder was an old game in heaven."
"You have to be able to look past the dead, sometimes there are good trinkets to take away from them."
"There is no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war."
"Horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained."
"Our heartache poured into one another like water from cup to cup."
"I knew no more time than that could be overlooked."
"I need to understand how to go after this man."
"It was a skill his mother, not his father, had taught him."
"To take action only after calculating the worst possible outcome of each choice available."
"He had perfected his patter to the police, a certain obsequious innocence peppered with wonder about their procedures."
"I would lay these photographs down in my mind, those gathered from my constant watching, and I could trace how one thing my death connected these images to a single source."
"No one could have predicted how my loss would change small moments on Earth."
"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."
"It was what Lindsey, in her workouts, called an active rest; my muscles were still engaged but my focus relaxed."
"Despite her willed stomping and pitching in its streets and byways, the city itself had very little to do with her interior life."
"She dressed hurriedly in black tights, a short black skirt, black boots, and a black T-shirt, all of them stained from serving double-duty as work clothes and real clothes."
"I saw women hanging or collecting wash as I peered from the windows of the suddenly silent trains."
"Wet laundry: the snap, the yank, the wet heaviness of double-and queen-sized sheets."
"She was unaware that she was somewhat of a celebrity up in heaven."
"Ruth would get an image and it would burn into her memory."
"Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time."
"Everything is changing here now. Every time I come back something is gone that made it not just every other place in the country."
"I was a soul back on Earth. AWOL a little while from heaven, I had been given a gift."
"Dreams of being a wildlife photographer, dreams of winning an Oscar in junior year, dreams of kissing Ray Singh once more. Look what happens when you dream."
"Leaving Earth again was easier than coming back had been."
"At the tips of feathers there is air and at their base: blood."
"You can talk to us and think about us. It doesn't have to be sad or scary."
"Nurse Eliot, he said, I'll remember your kindness but I hope it will be a long time before I see you again."
"I wish I could say that in that moment in the kitchen she decided to quit drinking, but I now saw that drinking was part of what made her who she was."
"Are you going to hurt him again? I'm going to do everything I can not to, my mother said, but no promises this time."
"Marveling was what she mostly did after she came back."
"These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence."
"You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to."
"In some way I could not account for, had they reached a state of bliss?"
"I realized then that they would not know when I was gone."
"I was done yearning for them, needing them to yearn for me."
"It was a surprise to everyone when Lindsey found out she was pregnant."