The Virgin Suicides Quotes
"This ain't TV, folks, this is how fast we go."
"They're dead. They only live twenty-four hours. They hatch, they reproduce, and then they croak. They don't even get to eat."
"What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets."
"Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl."
"Suicide, as a mortal sin, is a matter of intent. It's very difficult to know what was in those girls' hearts. What they were really trying to do."
"When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly."
"We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together."
"Most of the diary told us more about how the girls came to be than why they killed themselves."
"The diary is an unusual document of adolescence in that it rarely depicts the emergence of an unformed ego."
"Her precocious prose turns to impersonal subjects, the commercial of the weeping Indian paddling his canoe along a polluted stream, or the body counts from the evening war."
"All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, and to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier."
"In the orange light, the students' heads looked like sea anemones, undulating quietly, and the silence of the room was that of the ocean floor."
"You never know what'll set the memory off. A baby's face. A bell on a cat's collar. Anything."
"Most people never taste that kind of love. At least I tasted it once, man."
"You would have killed yourself just to have something to do."
"Adolescents tend to seek love where they can find it."
"It seemed like we were supposed to feel sorry for everything that ever happened, ever."
"The sadness had started long before. Before America. The girls had it, too."
"We just want to live. If anyone would let us."
"Once they're out of you, they're different, kids are."
"It's the kind of music they play when you die."
"I just want to live. If anyone would let us."
"That poor girl's under so much stress, her appendix just blew up."
"We saw them through the toll they exacted on him: his puffy red eyes that hardly opened anymore to see his daughters wasting away; his shoes scuffed from climbing stairs forever threatening to lead to another inert body; his sallow complexion dying in sympathy with them; and his lost look of a man who realized that all this dying was going to be the only life he ever had."
"The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season."
"We never realized how many bumps we had until we went looking."
"But even though that winter was certainly not a happy one, little more can be averred."
"We could feel them, on the other end, blowing dust off the needle, holding the telephone over the spinning black disk, playing the volume low so as not to be overheard."
"We had never dreamed the girls might love us back."
"Inside their house they were prisoners; outside, lepers."
"The drama of this pleased us so much we momentarily forgot that our tunnel had already been built: the storm sewers."
"We thought of our communication with the Lisbon girls as a sacred confidence, even after such fidelity ceased to make sense."
"Every stone the girls built shelter with has, for Ms. Perl, an underside of mud and worms."
"We knew better. Three nights after the record playing, we saw Bonnie bring a black trunk into her bedroom."
"The sun had fallen below the horizon, but still lit the sky in an orange chemical streak more beautiful than nature."
"In the blackness, the leaves of our tree began to flutter, and the air filled with the crepuscular scent of the Lisbon house."
"We were above the street, aloft, at the same height as the Lisbon girls in their crumbling bedrooms, and they were calling to us."
"Our new height astounded us, and later many said this contributed to our resolve, because for the first time ever we felt like men."
"We advanced on the house from different directions, hiding in shadows of surviving trees."
"In front of us all, Lux unbuckled his belt. She didn't even need to look down. Her fingers saw their way."
"Even though she was doing it to Chase Buell, we could all feel Lux undoing us, reaching out for us and taking us as she knew we could be taken."
"The smell, now that we were inside, was stronger than ever. It was the smell of wet plaster, drains clogged with the endless tangle of the girls' hair, mildewed cabinets, leaking pipes."
"We were too busy gazing up into the darkness for a ladder of knotted bed sheets and a descending nightgown."
"At the party's zenith, when Alice was rolled out in an artificial lung rented for the night from Henry Ford Hospital (Mr. O'Connor was on the board), the rotting smell pervading the air seemed only a crowning touch of festive atmosphere."