Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones (2002)

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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.

Alice Sebold
Do you miss Susie?" Because it was dark, because Ruth was facing away from her, because Ruth was almost a stranger, Lindsey said what she felt. "More than anyone will ever know.

Alice Sebold
A father's suspicion...' she began. Is as powerful as a mother's intuition.'

Alice Sebold
Once released from life, having lost it in such violence, I couldn't calculate my steps. I didn't have time for contemplation. In violence it is the getting out that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from the shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping to land away from where you are.

Alice Sebold
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
He took the hat from my mouth. ''Tell me you love me'', he said. Gently I did. The end came anyway

Alice Sebold
Like snowflakes,' Franny said,'none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before

Alice Sebold
I fell in love with you again; While you were away - Jack Salmon

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

Alice Sebold
What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.

Alice Sebold
Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.

Alice Sebold
Ruth hadn't talked to my sister since before my death, and then it was only to excuse herself in the hallway at school. But she'd seen Lindsey walking home with Samuel and seen her smile with him. She watched as my sister said yes to pancakes and no to everything else. She had tried to imagine herself being my sister as she had spent time imagining being me.

Alice Sebold
His love for my mother wasn't about looking back and loving something that would never change. It was about loving my mother for everything — for her brokenness and her fleeing, for her being there right then in that moment before the sun rose and the hospital staff came in. It was about touching that hair with the side of his fingertip, and knowing yet plumbing fearlessly the depths of her ocean eyes.

Alice Sebold
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
How to Commit the Perfect Murder" was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.

Alice Sebold
She didn't even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house—it was the eyes, her dancer's carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.

Alice Sebold
I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. He didn't want to burn my photo or toss it away, but he didn't want to look at me anymore, either.

Alice Sebold
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.

Alice Sebold
My grandmother stepped back into the kitchen to get their drinks. I had come to love her more after death than I ever had on Earth. I wish I could say that in that moment in the kitchen she decided to quit drinking, but I now saw that drinking was a part of what made her who she was. If the worst of what she left on Earth was a legacy of inebriated support, it was a good legacy in my book.

Alice Sebold
I tried to take solace in Holiday, our dog. I missed him in a way I hadn't yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound silly but I didn't believe it, would not believe it.

Alice Sebold
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
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.

Alice Sebold
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

Alice Sebold
These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors. She kept an honor code with her journals and her poems. 'Inside, inside,' she would whisper quietly to herself when she felt the urge to tell...

Alice Sebold
I missed her then but it was an odd sort of missing because by then, I knew the meaning of forever.

Alice Sebold
I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines.

Alice Sebold
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?

Alice Sebold
Hey, Ocean Eyes, my father said. Where'd you go on us?

Alice Sebold
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
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'.

Alice Sebold