Цитаты из книги The Lovely Bones

• Your first kiss is your destiny.

- Nothing is ever certain.

«Но его отсутствие ранило хуже побоев. Даже если он приходил домой, садился с ней за стол и съедал все, что бы она ни приготовила, его как будто не было рядом.»

«Именно прошлой ночью мой папа впервые произнес: «Она к нам не вернется». Простая истина, которую давно усвоили все, кто меня знал. Но ему нужно было проговорить это вслух, а ей — услышать от него эти слова.»

«Он долго лежал в кровати, придавленный тяжестью. Зато потом спасительной соломинкой казалось движение, и он двигался, двигался, двигался, но не мог убежать от себя»

Нет, милая, страшные вещи случаются у нас под боком, с людьми, которых мы хорошо знаем.

Для таких, как он, у моего отца было обтекаемое выражение: «Большой оригинал!»

I was almost blinded by it, this choice; the idea that if I’d remained on Earth I could have left this place to claim another, that I could go anywhere I wanted to. And I wondered then, was it the same in heaven as on Earth? What I’d been missing was a wanderlust that came from letting go?

“Nothing is ever certain,” Len said. And the echo rang in her ears again. Len had a fixed set of phrases. It was this same phrase that my father had borrowed to soothe his family. It was a cruel phrase that preyed on hope.

“What does he do all day?” Ray asked. “Look creepy, I guess.”

Your first kiss is destiny knocking.

Each time my name was said by these strangers it felt like a pinprick. It was not the pleasant sensation that it could be when my father said it or when Ruth wrote it in her journal. It was the sensation of being simultaneously resurrected and buried within the same breath.

My mother’s desire to reach those waves, touch her feet to another ocean on the other side of the country, was all she was thinking of — the pure baptismal goal of it. Whoosh and you can start over again. Or was life more like the horrible game in gym that has you running from one side of an enclosed space to another, picking up and setting down wooden blocks without end?

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.

He was beginning to understand: you were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.

Buckley drew back and stared at my father’s creased face, the fine bright spots of tears at the corners 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.

Mr. Botte came to my memorial (as, may I add, did almost the entire junior high school — I was never so popular) and cried quite a bit.

Стоит вам чего-то пожелать, причем очень сильно и с умом, главное - с умом, и ваше желание сбудется.

Если бы мечты стали конями, то и нищие скакали бы верхом.

Почему? ... такие вопросы лишены смысла. Не вышло - и всё тут. Не стоит этим терзаться. Что толку?