The Virgin Suicides

"In the end we had pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained. Oddly shaped emptiness mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name. What lingered after them was not life, but the most trivial list of mundane facts. A clock ticking on the wall, a room dim at noon, the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself."

Doctor: "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets."

Cecilia: "Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl."

"We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm."

"What we have here is a dreamer. Someone completely out of touch with reality... When she jumped, she probably thought she could fly."

"We felt the imprisonment of being a girl."

"In the end, Parkie won because of the Cadillac, Kevin Head because he had the killer weed, and Joe Hill Conley because he won all the school prizes which Trip thought would impress Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon."

"She was the still point of the turning world, man."

"This is when we began seeing her making love on the roof with random men."

"We knew the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love, and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."

"You're a stone fox."

"So much has been said about the girls over the years. But we have never found an answer. It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls... but only that we had loved them... and that they hadn't heard us calling... still do not hear us calling them from out of those rooms... where they went to be alone for all time... and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together."

"No one could understand how Mrs. Lisbon and Mr. Lisbon, our math teacher, could produce such beautiful creatures."

"Given Lux's failure to make curfew everyone expected a crackdown, but few anticipated it would be so drastic. The girls were taken out of school, and Mrs. Lisbon shut the house in maximum-security isolation."

"Have we photosynthesized our breakfast today?"

"I liked her a lot, but it was different out on the field. I never saw her again."

"Almost every day, and even when she wasn't keeping an eye on Cecilia, Lux would suntan wearing a swimsuit that caused the knife sharpener to give her a 15-minute demonstration for free."

"Do you like to wrestle?"

"The trees, like lungs, filling with air. My sister -- the mean one -- pulling my hair."

"I baked a pie full of rat poison. I though I could eat it, you know, without being suspicious. My nana, who is 86... she really likes sweets. She had three pieces."

"Lux lost it over Kevin Haynes, the garbageman. She'd wake up at 5 in the morning and lay about on the front porch like it wasn't completely obvious! She wrote his name in marker in all her bras and underwear and mum found them and bleached out all the Kevins. Lux has been crying on her bed all day."

"Everyone had an opinion as to why Cecilia tried to kill herself."

Principal Woodhouse: "Your daughters haven't been in school for over two weeks."

Mr. Lisbon: "Have you checked out back?"

"…Lux’s frequent forged excuses from phys. Ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t’s and b’s of her mother’s signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L’s reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x.”

"We knew that they knew everything about us, and that we couldn't fathom them at all."

"Collecting everything we could of theirs, the Lisbon girls wouldn't leave our minds but they were slipping away. The color of their eyes was fading along with the exact locations... of moles and dimples. From five, they had become four, and they were all the living and the dead, becoming shadows. We would have lost them completely if the girls hadn't contacted us."

"Cecilia was the first to go."

"Everyone dates the demise of our neighborhood from the suicides of the Lisbon girls. People saw their clairvoyance in the wiped out elms. The harsh sunlight and the continuing decline of our auto industry.  Even then as teenagers we tried to put the pieces together.  We still can't.  Now whenever we run into each other at business lunches or cocktail parties we find ourselves in the corner going over the evidence once more time.  All to understand those five girls. That after all these years we can't get out of our minds."

"Cecilia the youngest was 13. And Lux was 14. Bonnie was 15. Mary was 16.  And Therese was 17. No one could understand how Mrs. Lisbon and Mr. Lisbon our math teacher had produced such beautiful creatures."


"Paul Baldino claimed to have found Cecilia on her first attempt."

"Palazzolo jumped off the roof over that rich bitch Porter. How stupid can you be?"

Lady: "That girl didn't want to die. She just wanted out of that house."
Other Lady: "She wanted out of that decorating scheme."

"He was the first boy in our neighborhood to wear sunglasses and within a week of his arrival he had fallen in love. The object of his desire wasn't Cecilia but Diana Porter.  When Diana Porter left on vacation in Switzerland Dominic denounced God. And to prove the validity of his love he jumped off the roof of his relatives house."