I wanted to be the moron of the family, because morons seemed to have more fun, more freedom and more personality.

If I had but an hour of love,if that be all that is given me,an hour of love upon this earth,I would give my love to thee.

I was in the air around him. I was in the cold mornings he had now. I was in the quiet time he spent alone. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. -Susie Salmon

I couldn't help but think, as I watched him, of the barrels of toxic fluids that had accrued behind Hal's bike shop where the scrub lining the railroad tracks had offered local companies enough cover to dump a stray contaner or two. Everything had been sealed up, but things were beginning to leak out. I had come to both pity and respect Len in the years since my mother left. He followed the physical to try to understand things that were impossible to comphrehend. In that, I could see, he was like me.

I like gardening - it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.

She didn't even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house--it was the eyes, her dancer's carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.

My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.