Book of Quotes

The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

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

- "Nothing is ever certain."

- "Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them."

- "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."

- "Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world."

- "Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained."

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

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

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

- "Between a man and a woman there was always one person who was stronger than the other one. That doesn't mean the weaker one doesn't love the stronger."

- "Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time."

- "This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one"

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

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

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

- "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."

- "You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out.Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room.

Grandma Lynn died several years later, but I have yet to see her here. I imagine her tying it on in her heaven, drinking mint juleps with Tennessee Williams and Dean Martin. She'll be here in her own sweet time, I'm sure.

If I'm to be honest with you, I still sneak away to watch my family sometimes. I can't help it, and sometimes they still think of me. They can't help it....

It was a suprise to everyone when Lindsey found out she was pregnant...My father dreamed that one day he might teach another child to love ships in bottles. He knew there would be both sadness and joy in it; that it would always hold an echo of me.