48 The Virgin Suicides Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel ‘The Virgin Suicides’ was published in 1993.

The storyline is set in the 1970s in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and focuses on the lives of five sisters known as the Lisbon girls, all of whom commit themselves.

I have handpicked some of the top quotes from The Virgin Suicides novel.

The Virgin Suicides Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

“You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn’t bother you so much.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“All wisdom ends in paradox.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived—bound, in other words, for life.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“The zipper opened all the way down our spines.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“Grief is natural,’ she said. ‘Overcoming it is a matter of choice.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“Scars crossed her welded wrists.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in…” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

Quotes from The Virgin Suicides

“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 (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“I don’t know what you’re feeling. I won’t even pretend.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“He didn’t understand how she had bewitched him, nor why having done so she promptly forgot his existence, and in desperate moods he asked his mirror why the only girl he was crazy about was the only girl not crazy about him.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“I do not think the patient truly meant to end her life. Her act was a cry for help.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking its passage for some reason.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and one, who went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her collarbones collected water.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“It seemed like we were supposed to feel sorry for everything that ever happened, ever.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“Adolescents tend to seek love where they can find it.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“They had killed themselves over the failure to find a love that none of us could ever be.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

Great The Virgin Suicides Quotes

“We had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us… 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 (quote from 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 (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“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 (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“You don’t understand me. I’m a teenager. I’ve got problems!” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“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 (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

Best Virgin Suicides Quotes

“The time has to be right and the heart willing.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“Eating is natural. Gaining weight is your choice.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn’t know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with, and he reached out in order to meet her for the first time.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“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.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“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 (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“We listened to them, but it was clear they’d received too much therapy to know the truth.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

Famous The Virgin Suicides Quotes

“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 (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“Their desire was silent yet magnificent, like a thousand daisies attuning their faces toward the path of the sun.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“During a warm winter rain … the basins of her collarbones collected water.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“Don’t waste your time on life.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“When asked why she had tried to kill herself, she said only, “It was a mistake.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“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 (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“Somebody out of touch with reality, when she jumped she probably thought she’d fly.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“His lost look of a man who realized that all this dying was going to be the only life he ever had.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“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 (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“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 (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“They’re just memories now. Time to write them off.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“In the end, it wasn’t death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

“Aloft, he looked frail, diseased, and temperamental, as we expected a European to look.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides (quote from The Virgin Suicides).

Sources: