My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. This is Susie Salmon. Watching from heaven, Susie... read more
Susie Salmon is a fourteen year old girl that was murdered. One afternoon she was walking home and the unthinkible happened she was murdered by her neighbor. Then she is up in heaven and is watching over her family and her murderer. Also she is helping her familly find who her mudered is. Soon... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)
“I don't mean la-la angel crap, but I do think there's a heaven.”Ruth Connors
“I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found a way to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.”Susie Salmon
“Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world.”Jack Salmon
“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”Juan Ramon Jimenez via Susie Salmon
“Your first kiss is destiny knocking.”Grandma Lynn
“Journal writing: At the tips of 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.”Ruth Connors
“I'd say it would be pretty hard to play soccer on the soccer field when it's approximately twenty feet from where my sister was supposedly murdered.”Lindsey Salmon
“You remind me of my wife," "She can't draw either?”Len Fenerman & Abigail Salmon
“Just you and your mother," my grandmother said. "The most frightening pairing imaginable.”Grandma Lynn
“We could keep trying," Ruth said. "I'm game if you don't tell anyone." "I thought you liked girls," Ray said. "I'll make you a deal," Ruth said. "You can pretend I'm Susie and I will too." "You are so entirely screwed up.R”Ruth Connors & Ray Singh
“Sometimes cats fall ten flights out of the windows of highrises and land on their feet. You only believe it because you've seen it in print.”Susie Salmon (In Ruth's body)
“Do you ever think about the dead, Ray?" "I'm in med school.”Susie Salmon (In Ruth's body)
“"His eyes were the darkest grey. When I watched him from heaven I did not hesitate to fall inside of them."”Susie Salmon
“In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on.”Susie Salmon
“He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.”Susie Salmon
“When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things.”
“Her temporary absence was beginning to take on the feel of permanence.”
“Watch out what faces you make. You'll freeze that way.”Grandma Lynn
“Life is a beautiful gasoline rainbow.”Susie Salmon
“There was too much blood in the earth.”Susie Salmon
“All I could do was talk, but no one on Earth could hear me.”Susie Salmon
“...marked a moment that had passed, one that would now be gone forever expect for a picture.”Susie Salmon
“that person had a sad end.........at least she's still in heaven”pie
“Nothing is ever certain.”Len Fenerman
“Buckley drew back and stared at my father's creased face, the fine bright spots of tears at the corner of his eyes. he nodded seriously and kissed my father's cheek. Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult.”Susie Salmon
“I wanted to lift him up, like statues I'd seen in art history books. A woman lifting up a man. The rescue in reverse. Daughter to father saying, "It's okay. You're okay. Now won't let anything hurt."”Susie Salmon
“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.”Susie Salmon (Referring to Buckley)
“Sometimes I think clues find their way in good time. If they want to be found, that is.”Len Fenerman
“To us there was only one true love in everyone's life; we had no concept of compromise, or retries.”Susie Salmon
“Lindsey: I'm scared. | Samuel: Don't be. ♥”
“What the box held was typical or disappointing or miraculous depending on the eye. It was typical because he was a thirteen-year-old boy, or it was disappointing because it was not a wedding ring, or it was miraculous. He'd given her half a heart. It was gold and from inside his Hukapoo shirt, he pulled out the other side. It hung around his neck on a rawhide cord. ♥”Susie Salmon (Reffering to Lindsey and Samuel)
“Reproductive organ = "Baby making machinery"”Abigail Salmon via Susie Salmon
“Jack: I'm glad Susie had a nice boy like her. I'll thank your son for that. | Ruana: ... <smiled> | Jack: He wrote her a love note. | Ruana: Yes. | Jack: I wish I had known enough to do the same. Tell her I loved her on that last day.”
“Ruana: A father's suspicion... | Jack: Is as powerful as a mother's intuition.”
“It's <Zipper of a dress> one of the reasons for a man--you can't do this stuff yourself.”Grandma Lynn
“There is no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.”Jack Salmon
“Ruth: Did you feel something when you kissed Susie? | Ray: Yes. | Ruth: What? | Ray: That I wanted more. That night I dreamed of kissing her again and wondered if she was thinking the same thing. ♥”
“But at some point I had decided to take portraits of my mother. When he'd pick the roll up at the photo lab my father sat into the car staring at photos of woman he felt he barely knew anymore. Since then he had taken these photos out too many times, but each time he looked into the face of this woman he had felt something growing inside him. It took him a long time to realize what it was. Only recently had his wounded synapses allowed him to name it. he had been falling in love all over again. ♥”Susie Salmon
“Samuel: I love you. | Lindsey: I know. | Samuel: No, I mean, I love you, and I want to marry you, and I want to live in this house! | Lindsey: What? | Samuel: That hideous, college shit is over! | Lindsey: Not for me, it isn't. | Samuel: Marry me. | Lindsey: Samuel. | Samuel: I'm tired of doing the right things. Marry me and I'll make this house gorgeous. | Lindsey: Who will support us? | Samuel: We will, somehow. | Lindsey: Okay. | Samuel: Okay? | Lindsey: I think I can. I mean, yes! ♥”
“Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.”Grandfather
“I thought if I was very quiet I would hear you. If I was still enough you might come back.”Jack Salmon
“I fell in love with you again while you were away. ♥”Jack Salmon
“I realized how much I wish I could be where my mother was. 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. ♥”Susie Salmon (Referring to Jack and Abigail Salmon)
“He had made a certain kind of love to my mother before she went away. Sex as an act of willful forgetting.”Susie Salmon (Referring to Len Fenerman)
“He was watching her lips move and not really listening to her. Wanting to kiss her instead. ♥”Susie Salmon (Referring to Jack and Abigail Salmon)
“Ray: Ruth? | Ruth <Susie>: Yes? | Ray: Can I kiss you again? | Ruth <Susie>: Yes. | Ray: What is it? | Ruth <Susie>: When you kiss me I see heaven. ♥”
“How could it be that you could love someone somuch and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home? Shehad put billboards and roads in between them, throwing roadblocks behind herand ripping off the rearview mirror, and thought that that would make himdisappear? erase their life and children?”Abigail
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.Highlighted by 334 Kindle customers
Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.Highlighted by 325 Kindle customers
When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living—to learn to accept?Highlighted by 222 Kindle customers
“There is no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.”Highlighted by 205 Kindle customers
Juan Ramón Jiménez. It went like this: “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”Highlighted by 178 Kindle customers
“When the dead are done with the living,” Franny said to me, “the living can go on to other things.” “What about the dead?” I asked. “Where do we go?” She wouldn’t answer me.Highlighted by 157 Kindle customers
obsequious innocence peppered with wonder about their procedures or useless ideas that he presented as if they might help.Highlighted by 55 Kindle customers
assiduous she could free us both. I would read over her shoulder as she wrote down her thoughts and wonder if anyone might believe her one day.Highlighted by 55 Kindle customers
Ruth did not believe in makeup. She thought it demeaned women. Samuel Heckler was holding Lindsey’s hand. A word from her readings popped into her head: subjugation.Highlighted by 40 Kindle customers
ardentness was off-putting on a sunny afternoon, and when the open faces of young men caught sight of her they closed down or looked away. She zigzagged up and across the park. There were obvious places where she could go, like the rambles, to document the history of violence there without even leaving the trees, but she preferred those places people considered safe.Highlighted by 29 Kindle customers
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Snapshots
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Bones
Acknowledgments
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