Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones” Quotes (69 Quotes)

After a few days in heaven, I realized that the javelin-throwers and the shot-putters and the boys who played basketball on the cracked blacktop were all in their own version of heaven. Theirs just fit with mine- didn't duplicate it precisely, but had a lot of the same things going on inside.

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

Look what happens when we dream.

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.

Your first kiss is destiny knocking.

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

His love for my mother wasn't about looking back and loving something that would never chance. 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.

Loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman.

Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.

You're dead and you have to accept it.

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.

How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home?

Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.

The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see a figure standing at the end of thier bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus.

It was then that, without knowing how, I revealed myself. In every piece of glass, in every shard and sliver, I cast my face. My father glanced down and around him, his eyes roving across the room. Wild. It was just for a second, and then I was gone.

And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.

I fell in love with you again; While you were away.

My father had not been outside the house except to drive back and forth to work or sit out in the backyard, for months, nor had he seen his neighbors. Now he looked at them, from face to face, until he realized I had been loved by people he didn't even recognize. His heart filled up, warm again as it had not been in what seemed so long to him- save small forgotten moments with Buckley, the accidents of love that happened with his son.

The living deserve attention, too

Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult.

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

I focused very hard on the dead geranium in his line of vision. I thought if I could make it bloom he would have his answer. In my heaven it bloomed. In my heaven geranium petals swirled in eddies up to my waist. On Earth nothing happened... I stood alone in a sea of bright petals.

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.

The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was away . But when people left they always came back.

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

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.

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.

Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go.

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.

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.

No one on the street thought anything of the downtown girl dressed in black who had paused in the middle of midtown foot traffic. In her art student camouflage she could walk the entire length of Manhattan and, if not blend in, be classified and therefore ignored.

There was one thing my murderer didn't understand; he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.

At nearly two months,the idea of it as news was fading in the hearts of all but my family-and Ruth

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

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.

There was our father, the heart we knew held all of us. Held us heavily and desperately, the doors of his heart opening and closing with the rapidity of stops on an instrument, the quiet felt closures, the ghostly fingering, practice and practice and then, incredibly, sound and melody and warmth.

At the tips of the feathers there is air and at their base: blood. I hold up bones; I wish like broken glass they could court light… still I try to place these pieces back together, to set them firm, to make murdered girls live again.

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.

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

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

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.

I was like I was in science class: I was curious.

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

There's no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.

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.

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.

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.

This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one

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.

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.