The Virgin Suicides Quotes

“We knew, finally, that 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.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it—that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Virgin suicide
What was that she cried?
No use in stayin'
On this holocaust ride
She gave me her cherry
She's my virgin suicide”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;
Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching Earth;
Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth
With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.
She hath no questions, she hath no replies.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Even our parents seemed to agree more and more with the television version of things, listening to the reporters' inanities as though they could tell us the truth about our own lives.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls' emotional state at that point, he said, "Buffeted but not broken.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Her tragedy hadn't made her more approachable, and in fact lent her the unknowable quality of a person who had suffered more than could be expressed.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Boys often have permission to become men without the forfeiture of their desirability. And so these men write stories that grasp at girls who are ghosts twice over: first by being dead and second by being shallow shadows of actual girls, the assorted fragments of men's aging imaginations rather than the deep and dimensioned creatures that real girls are.”
― Alana Massey, All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers

“They had killed themselves over the failure to find a love that none of us could ever be.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“They didn't exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen. Even in sensible school shoes, she shuffled as though barefoot, and the baggy apparel Mrs. Lisbon bought for her only increased her appeal, as though after undressing she had put on whatever was handy. In corduroys her thighs rubbed together, buzzing, and there was always at least one untidy marvel to unravel him: an untucked shirttail, a sock with a hole, a ripped seam showing underarm hair. She carted her books from class to class but never opened them. Her pens and pencils were as temporary as Cinderella's broom. When she smiled, her mouth showed too many teeth, but at night Trip Fontaine dreamed of being bitten by each one.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides

“Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls. Our parents thought it had to do with our music, our godlessness, or the loosening of morals regarding sex we hadn't even had.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Next to it were five potted photographs of the Lisbon girls, pinned with rusty tacks. We didn't remember putting them up, but there they were, dim from time and weather so that all we could make out were phosphorescent outlines of the girls' bodies, each a different glowing letter of an unknown alphabet.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Though the boys never admit it as much, it is crucial the Lisbon sisters are all thin and beautiful within reason. There are a handful of imperfect features among them but nothing that would make the sum of each one's parts less than desirable. In the safety of being attractive, their eccentricities are as precious as their bodies. Their bodies protect all eccentricity from becoming "strange" or "gross" in the way similar predilections are characterized when possessed by heavier or uglier girls.”
― Alana Massey, All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers

“Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable, and she thought when Dominic heard about it, on the highway, amid the cactus, he would realize that it was she who loved him.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“It occurred to us that she and the girls read secret signs of misery in cloud formations, that despite the discrepancies in their ages something timeless communicated itself between them, as though she were advising the girls in her mumbling Greek, "Don't waste your time on life.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Though she carried on few extended conversations, we got an idea of her state of mind from the little that got back to us of the little she said.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“She was the still point of the turning world.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides/T.S. Eliot

“All wisdom ends in paradox”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“I ask you: is dullness a gift? Intelligence a curse? I'm fort-seven years old and live alone.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides

“I ask you: is dullness a gift? Intelligence a curse? I'm forty-seven years old and live alone.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, (The Virgin Suicides) [By: Eugenides, Jeffrey] [Jun, 2013]