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.”
xxx
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.
xxx
Susie Salmon: There was one thing my murderer didn’t understand; he didn’t understand how much a father could love his child.
xxx
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 on the way. He stepped out of nowhere and ruined the shot. He ruined a lot of things.
xxx
Susie Salmon: I wasn’t lost, or frozen, or gone… I was alive; I was alive in my own perfect world.
xxx
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.
xxx
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.
xxx
Susie Salmon: Grandma Lynn predicted I would live a long life because I had saved my brother. As usual, Grandma Lynn was wrong.
xxx
[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.
