This is my third and final day doing the 3 Quotes Challenge, I was nominated for this challenge by A House of Books blog. As with yesterday’s post, I’m also using this as a chance to continue my Bookish Memories series that I started when I first began blogging.

 

Today’s quote comes from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

“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.”

I bought this book in hardback soon after it was first published and I loved it. I know that since then it became a bestseller and seems to be something of a marmite book. I’ve read it quite a few times since that first time and I still love it. It’s my comfort book, I always seek this book out when I’m upset and it really does give me such solace.

The above quote is one I marked in the book when I first read it and it’s still a quote I like to remind myself of from time to time. The Lovely Bones is told from the perspective of a murdered teenage girl, so we get to follow her journey as she tries to come to terms with her own death and with how life goes on for the people she left behind. The quote I chose is something she said in the book and I just think it’s a great reminder that we all bring people together in our lives, everyone we know is connected by us even if the connections between them is only us. It’s a reminder that when a loved one dies we still have a link to them via all the people they knew, even if we didn’t know the people well, or even at all.

I found comfort from this book after my mum died, and also really saw the depth in the quote. A close friend of my mum’s from when she was a teenager still writes to me quite regularly and shares little snippets of memories about my mum. It is so lovely to have this connection to mum’s friend that I never had before and I know my mum would be really happy about it if she could have known about it.

I know The Lovely Bones as a novel isn’t perfect but the reason I love it so much is because of how it makes me feel, for the paragraphs that jump out at me and give me comfort and solace.

About the Book

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.

In heaven, Susie Salmon can have whatever she wishes for – except what she most wants, which is to be back with the people she loved on earth. In the wake of her murder, Susie watches as her happy suburban family is torn apart by grief; as her friends grow up, fall in love, and do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But as Susie will come to realize, even in death, life is not quite out of reach . . .

A luminous, astonishing novel about life and death, memory and forgetting, and finding light in the darkest places, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones became an instant classic when it was first published in 2002. There are now over ten million copies in print.

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Please feel free to join in with the 3 Quotes Challenge if you’d like to, and if you link it back to this post or share you link in the comments, I’ll be sure to share it. Please note the challenge is just to share one quote every day for three days, the rest of this post was just how I chose to expand on the tag.