Jeffrey Eugenides - The Virgin Suicides (1993)

33 Sourced Quotes

View all Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes
We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.

Jeffrey Eugenides
The window was still open. Mr Lisbon said. I don't think we'd ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close it or else she'd go on jumping out of it forever

Jeffrey Eugenides
And she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world

Jeffrey Eugenides
The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.

Jeffrey Eugenides
They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Girls forbidden to dance would only attract husbands with bad complexions and sunken chests.

Jeffrey Eugenides
I saw the movie, he said. I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so - he leaned toward us - their tits bleed.

Jeffrey Eugenides
In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope

Jeffrey Eugenides
What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.

Jeffrey Eugenides
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.

Jeffrey Eugenides
We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.

Jeffrey Eugenides
We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in...

Jeffrey Eugenides
Three times a day Petrovich showed up at the nurse's office for his injections, always using the hypodermic needle himself like the most craven of junkies, though after shooting up he would play the concert piano in the auditorium with astounding artistry, as though insulin were the elixir of genius.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking it's passage for some reason.

Jeffrey Eugenides
At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.

Jeffrey Eugenides
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.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Lux spent the ride dialing the radio for her favorite song. "It makes me crazy," she said. "You know they're playing it somewhere, but you have to find it.

Jeffrey Eugenides
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.

Jeffrey Eugenides
They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.

Jeffrey Eugenides
The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.

Jeffrey Eugenides
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
But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.

Jeffrey Eugenides
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
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, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Grief is natural,' she said. 'Overcoming it is a matter of choice.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.

Jeffrey Eugenides
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.

Jeffrey Eugenides