Alice Sebold

“Well, as my dad would say, it means she’s out of this shithole.”

“When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things," Franny said. "What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?”

“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”

“Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.”

“About Grandma Lynn: She was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. At seventy, she had come to believe in time alone.”

“All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why -- really know -- it will come.”

“I wondered if this longing in a three-year-old had sparked what came at eight. That fuzzy feeling of difference, that her crushes on female teachers or her cousin were more real than the other girls' crushes. Hers contained a desire beyond sweetness and attention, it fed a longing, beginning to flower green and yellow into a crocuslike lust, the soft petals opening into her awkward adolescence. It was not so much, she would write in her journal, that she wanted to have sex with women, but that she wanted to disappear inside of them forever. To hide.”

“If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.”

“There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven.”

“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.”

“Dentro la palla di neve sulla scrivania di mio padre c'era un pinguino con una sciarpa a righe bianche e rosse. Quando ero piccola papà mi metteva seduta sulle sue ginocchia e prendeva in mano la palla di neve. La capovolgeva perché la neve si raccogliesse tutta in cima, poi con un colpo secco la ribaltava. E insieme guardavamo la neve che fioccava leggera intorno al pinguino. Il pinguino è tutto solo, pensavo, e mi angustiavo per lui. Lo dicevo a papà e lui mi rispondeva: "Non ti preoccupare, Susie, sta da re. È prigioniero di un mondo perfetto".”

“I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines. ”

“Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.”

“She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. ”

“The stains could be seen only in the sunlight, so Ruth was never really aware of them until later, when she would stop at an outdoor cafe for a cup of coffee, and look down at her skirt and see the dark traces of spilled vodka or whiskey. The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: 'booze affects material as it does people'.”

“You don't notice the dead leaving when they really hoose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down.”

“Ruth had been a girl haunted and now she would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of it, the story of my life and death, was hers if she chose to tell it, even to one person at a time.”

“Every day a question mark.”

“She wasn't much of a talker when there was nothing to say.”

“but, he also said it because part of him wanted more of her, this cold woman who was not exactly cold, this rock who was not stone.”

“She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was.”

“My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.”

“As she brought prospective buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag.”

“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.”

“Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?”

“Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.”

“For Lorenz, virgins were not a part of his world. He was skeptical of many things I said. Later, when the serology reports proved that what I had said was not a lie, that I had been a virgin, and that I was telling the truth, he could not respect me enough. I think he felt responsible, somehow. It was, after all, in his world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime.”

“I was trying to prove to them and to myself that I was still who I had always been. I was beautiful, if fat. I was smart, if loud. I was good, if ruined.”

“Hey, Ocean Eyes,” my father said. “Where’d you go on us?”

“The earth has a mouth?” Buckley asked.A big round mouth but with no lips,” my father said.Jack,” my mother said, laughing, “stop it. Do you know I caught him outside growling at the snapdragons?”

“His cruelty was in his absence.”

“She wasn't actually speaking to me, she was singing a kind of lullaby of talk. But, eventually, the music stopped. ”

“He had to seek out her eyes. They weren't focusing on him. They seemed to be preoccupied, and he wished he could reach up and grab them and train them on here and now. On him. ”

“So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything.”

“When he felt his heart hurt he turned into something stronger than a little boy, and he grew up this way.A heart that flashed from heart to strone, heart to stone.As I watched I thought of what Grandma Lynn liked to say when Lindsey and I rolled our eyes or grimaced behind her back."Watch out what faces you make,. Youll freeze that way." (The Lovely Bones)”

“If I had but an hour of love,if that be all that is given me,an hour of love upon this earth,I would give my love to thee.”

“She thought of sex as the Star Trek transport.You vaporized and found yourself navigating another planet within the second or two it took to realign.”

“He tunneled into stories where weak men changed into strong half-animals or used eye beams or magic hammers to power through steel or climb up the sides of skyscrapers. He was the Hulk when angry and Spidey the rest of the time. When he felt his heart hurt he turned into something stronger than a little boy, and he grew up this way. A heart that flashed from heart to stone, heart to stone. As I watched I thought of what Grandma Lynn liked to say when Lindsey and I rolled our eyes or grimaced behind her back. "Watch out what faces you make. You'll freeze that way.”

“The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: "booze affects material as it does people.”

“As if in the other side of his kiss there could ve a new life”

“Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.”

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”

“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”

“I fell in love with you again; While you were away - Jack Salmon”

“He had been my almost. My might-have-been.I was afraid of what I wanted most - His kiss. Still, I collected kiss stories. -Susie Salmon”

“And i was gone.”

“Outside the hospital, a young girl who was selling small bouquets of daffodils, their green stems tied with lavender ribbons. I watched as my mother bought out the girl's whole stock. Nurse Eliot, who remembered my mother from eight years ago volunteered to help her when she saw her comng down the hall, her arms full of flowers. She rounded up extra water pitchers from a supply closet and together, she and my mother filled them with water and placed the flowers around my father's room while he slept. Nurse Eliot thought that if loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman, my mother had grown even more beautiful.(The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold)”

“Since their first kiss in our kitchen two weeks after my death, I had known that he was - as my sister and I had giggled with our Barbies or while watching Bobby Sherman on TV - her one and only. Samuel had pressed himself into her need and the cement between the two of them had begun to set immediately. They had gone to Temple together, side by side. He had hated it and she had pushed him through. She had loved it and this had allowed him to survive.”

“It was then that I slipped in the darkness, unable to know if I could be seen.I made myself small in the darkness, unable to know if I could be seen. I had left for hours every day for eight and a half years as I had left my mother or Ruth and Ray, my brother and sister, and certainly Mr. Harvey, but he, I now saw had never left me. His devotion to me had made me know again and again that I had been beloved. In the warm light of my father’s love I had remained Susie Salmon-a girl with my whole life in front of me. “I thought if I was very quiet I would hear you,” he whispered.“If I was still enough you might come back.”

“Almost everyone in heaven has someone on Earth they watch, a loved one, a friend or even a stranger who was once kind, who offered warm food or a bright smile when one of us had needed it. And when I wasn’t watching I could hear the others talking to those they loved on Earth: just as fruitlessly as me, I’m afraid. A one-sided card cajoling and coaching of the young, a one way loving and desiring of their mates, a single-sided card that could never get signed.”