A lot of people ask questions that they don't want to answer themselves, and if we're honest about the intimacy that we have with our parents, you wish them the best and you wish them the worst more than anybody else in the world. I think everyone has had a moment in their life where they wished a parent ill, and I think it's perhaps a very romantic idea that that doesn't happen.

I left my mark on that man.

Nothing is ever certain.

He had been my almost. My might-have-been. I was afraid of what I wanted most - His kiss. Still, I collected kiss stories. -Susie Salmon

What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.

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

No one on the street thought anything of the downtown girl dressed in black who had paused in the middle of midtown foot traffic. In her art student camouflage she could walk the entire length of Manhattan and, if not blend in, be classified and therefore ignored.