1. “People grow up by living. I want to live.”
2. “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.”
3. “Like a medical procedure,’ Ruth said. ‘Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet.”
4. “You’re dead and you have to accept it.”
5. “I loved Ruth on those mornings . . . we were born to keep each other company. Odd girls who had found each other in the strangest way – in the shiver she had felt when I passed.”
6. “Your first kiss is destiny knocking.”
7. “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”
8. “And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.”
9. “No one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult. ”
10. “We’re here, you know … All the time. You can talk to us and think about us. It doesn’t have to be sad or scary.”
11. “I could see an old and beautiful olive tree just up ahead. ”
12. “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.”
13. “He had had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.”
14. “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.”
15. “Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go”
16. “He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.”
17. “These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors”
18. “Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.”
19. “It was on 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 the sun; it cannot be contained. ”
20. “Nothing is ever certain.”
21. “The end came anyway.”
22. “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?.”
23. “She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone.”
24. “She had needed the time to know that this love would not destroy her, and I had, I now knew, given her that time, could give it, for it was what I had in great supply.”
25. “greatest hope. Last night it had been my father who’d”
26. “Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was an immaculate anonymity.”
27. “I would do exactly what you are doing: I would talk to everyone I needed to, I would not tell too many people his name. When I was sure,” she said, “I would find a quiet way, and I would kill him.”
28. “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.”
29. “Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.”
30. ″ It was an elbow. The Gilbert’s dog found it. ”
31. “When they reached the lobby and the doors opened I knew they were meant to be there, the four of them, alone.”
32. “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.”
33. “The air inside the station wagon was cold and fragile. I could see the moist air when he exhaled, and this made me want to palpate my own stony lungs.”
34. “Stones and bones; snow and frost; seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Susie misses .”
35. “When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are.”
36. “I fell in love with you again; While you were away – Jack Salmon.”
37. “The living deserve attention, too”
38. “I missed her then, but it was an odd sort of missing because by then I knew the meaning of forever.”
39. “As if in the other side of his kiss there could ve a new life”
40. “If I was aware I would have to tie laces I would not have been able to put my feet into socks.”
41. “Give that love to the living.”
42. “Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.”
43. “I wish you all a long and happy life.”
44. “it was glorious. I was almost alive again.”
45. “She had a stare that stretched to infinity. She was, in that moment, not my mother but something separate from me.”
46. “Please don’t let Daddy die Susie,” he whispered. “I need him.”
47. “I felt like observing my way out of there, but I didn’t.”
48. “Last night it had been my father who had finally said it: “She’s never coming home.” A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it.”
49. “There’s no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.”
50. “I wish I had known enough to do the same…tell her I loved her on that last day.”
51. “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.”
52. “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.”
53. ″ The guilt on him, the hand of God pressing down on him. ”
54. “People grow up by living.”
55. “Placing blame was easier than adding up the mounting figures of what he’d lost.”
56. “She could shut out the whole world, including herself.”
57. “Every day a question mark.”
58. “Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.”
59. “Hey, Ocean Eyes,” my father said. “Where’d you go on us?”
60. “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.”
61. “This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one.”
62. “I wish now that I had known this was weird.”
63. “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.”
64. “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.”
65. “I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.”
66. “He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of my death, and afterwards he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass.”
67. “The sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. “I think she listens,” she said, too softly to be heard.”
68. “There wasn’t a lot of bullshit in my heaven.”
69. “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.”
70. “He wore his own innocence like a comfortable old coat.”
71. “But I came to believe that if I watched closely, and desired, I might change the lives of those I loved on Earth.”
72. “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.”
73. “He took the hat from my mouth. ”Tell me you love me”, he said. Gently I did. The end came anyway”
74. “When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things.”
75. “We stood– the dead child and the living –on either side of my father, both wanting the same thing. To have him to ourselves forever. To please us both was an impossibility.”
76. “And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it.”
77. “Her brain was a storm, her usual insight gone.”
78. “I was like I was in science class: I was curious.”
79. “You aren’t leaving, Susie. You’re mine now. ”
80. “I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away. ”
81. “Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish.”
82. “What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant
83. “She held on to two sides of an hourglass and wondered how this could be possible. The time she’d had alone had been gravitationally circumscribed by when her attachments would pull her back. And they had pulled now – doublefisted.”
84. “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.”
85. “Like snowflakes,’ Franny said,’none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before”
86. “You can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth.”
87. “Do you know how alone I’ve always felt?”
88. “They would go back to their homes and put me to rest, a letter from the past never reopened or reread.”
89. “Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.”
90. “Look what happens when we dream.”
91. “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.”
92. “Where’d you go on us?.”
93. “In the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.”
94. “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’.”
95. “When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living – to learn to accept?”
96. “I knew gloves meant you were an adult and mittens meant you weren’t.”
97. “It was ugly and precious all at once.”
98. “Every time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.”
99. “Loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman.”
100. “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.”
101. “I left my mark on that man.”
102. “As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.”
103. “There wasn’t a lot of bullshit in my heaven.”
