The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on. 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.

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

The truth was that the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.

What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.

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

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.

His cruelty was in his absence. Even when he came and sat at her dinner table and ate her food, he was not there.

If the worst of what she left on Earth was a legacy of inebriated support, it was a good legacy in my book.

When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living—to learn to accept?

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.