Saoirse Ronan: Susie Salmon

The Lovely Bones

Susie Salmon

[last lines]
Susie Salmon: [voiceover] When my mother came to my room, I realized that all this time, I'd been waiting for her. I had been waiting so long, I was afraid she wouldn't come.
Abigail Salmon: [whispering] I love you, Susie.
Susie Salmon: [voiceover] Nobody notices when we leave. I mean, the moment when we really choose to go. At best you might feel a whisper, or the wave of a whisper, undulating down. My name is Salmon, like the fish. First name: Susie. I was 14 years old, when I was murdered, on December 6, 1973. I was here for a moment. And then I was gone. I wish you all a long and happy life.

Susie Salmon: There was one thing my murderer didn't understand; he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.

Susie Salmon: When I was alive, I never hated anyone. But now hate was all that I had.

Susie Salmon: Grandma Lynn predicted I would live a long life because I had saved my brother. As usual, Grandma Lynn was wrong.

Susie Salmon: 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.

Susie Salmon: My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. I took his photo once as he talked to my parents about his border flowers. I was aiming for the bushes when he got in the way. He stepped out of nowhere and ruined the shot. He ruined a lot of things.

[first lines]
Susie Salmon: [voiceover] I remember being really small; too small to see over the edge of a table. There was a snow globe, and I remember the penguin who lived inside the globe. He was all alone in there, and I worried for him.

Susie Salmon: I was slipping away, that's what it felt like, life was leaving me, but I wasn't afraid; then I remembered: "There was something I was meant to do; somewhere I was meant to be."

Ray Singh: If I had but an hour of love, If that be all that is given me, An hour of love upon this earth,
Susie Salmon: [Ray's poem finished by Susie] I would give my love to thee.

Susie Salmon: My murderer could live in one moment for a long time. He could feed off the memory, over and over again. He was animal. Faceless. Infinite. But then he would feel it, the emptiness returning, and the need would rise in him again.

Susie Salmon: I wasn't lost, or frozen, or gone... I was alive; I was alive in my own perfect world.

Susie Salmon: Holly said there was a wide, wide heaven beyond everything we knew; where there was no cornfield, no memory, no grave... but I wasn't looking beyond yet, I was still looking back.

Susie Salmon: I was in the blue horizon between heaven and earth. The days were unchanging and every night I dream the same dream. The smell of damp earth. The scream no one heard. The sound of my heart beating like a hammer against cloth and I would hear them calling, the voices of the dead. I wanted to follow them to find a way out but I would always come back to the same door. And I was afraid. I knew if I went in there I would never come out.

Susie Salmon: Always, I would watch Ray; I was in the air around him, I was in the cold winter mornings he spent with Ruth Connors; and sometimes Ray would think of me, but he began to wonder maybe it was time to put that memory away, maybe it was time to let me go.

Ray Singh: [voiceover] If I had but an hour of love. If that be all is given me. An hour of love upon this earth...
Susie Salmon: [reading poem] I would give my love to thee. The Moor.

Susie Salmon: You realize by the time I see my photos, I'm gonna be middle-aged.

Susie Salmon: When people asked my mother, she always said she had two children.
[not counting Susie, her third, albeit deceased, child]

Susie Salmon: [while taking her safari jungle photos in her front yard] For now, I'd have to make do with Grace Tarking.
[Susie snaps a photo of an obese teenager jogging past her house]