From ‘The Lovely Bones’, a novel by Alice Sebold
This is the story of a little girl who is raped and murdered, while her killer walked free and the lives of all around her were affected in their own unique ways, grief was their one unifying factor. It is fairly traumatic, and also takes a lot of creative licence for the topics of heaven and death. However, it never felt religiously inclined, but more so like the hope of a soul’s demise once our bodies are charred and detached. One should note that ‘The Lovely Bones’ has perhaps one of the best literary character of a father, created and presented purely from the motivation of the love a parent would have for the child.
“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.”
“When I first entered heaven I thought everyone saw what I saw.”
“I knew he was going to kill me. I did not realize then that I was an animal already dying.”
“At first he couldn’t even get up. He lay there under a heavy weight. But then only movement could save him, and he moved and he moved and he moved, no movement being enough to make up for it. The guilt on him, the hand of God pressing down on him, saying, You were not there when your daughter needed you.”
“Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.”
“Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.”
“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.”
“Murderers are not monsters, they’re men. And that’s the most frightening thing about them.”
“How to Commit the Perfect Murder” was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.”
Jack Salmon to his estranged wife.
“I fell in love with you again; While you were away.”
