THE VIRGIN SUICIDES
By: Jeffrey Eugenides
"We became acquainted with starry skies the girls had gazed at while camping years before, and the boredom of summers traipsing from back yard to front to back again, and even a certain indefinable smell that arose from toilets on rainy nights, which the girls called 'sewery'. We knew what it felt like to see a boy with his shirt off, and why it made Lux write the name Kevin in purple Magic Marker all over her three-ring binder and even on her bras and panties, and we understood her rage coming home one day to find Mrs. Lisbon had soaked her things in Clorox, bleaching all the 'Kevins' out. We knew the pain of the winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing whihc colors went together... 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." (43-44)
"In cynical entries she suggests that trees aren't sick at all, and that the deforesting is a plot 'to make everything flat'." (44)
"It was the greatest show of common effort we could remember in our neighborhood, all those lawyers, doctors, and mortgage bankers locked arm in arm in the trench, with our mothers bringing out orange Kool-Aid, and for a moment our century was noble again." (53-54)
"But now Mr. bates didnt scream or try to get the truck's license plate, nor did Mrs. Bates, who had once wept when we set off firecrackers in her state-fair tulips - they said nothing, and our parents said nothing, so that we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars." (55)
"Every second is eternal." (78)
"She was the still point of the turning world." - Eliot, Collected Poems
"Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes he had ever seen." (79)
"The smell was so thick it seemed liquid, and stepping into its current felt like being sprayed." (165)
"The smell was partly bad breath, cheese, milk, tongue film, but also the singed smell of drilled teeth." (165)
"And, flipping pages, hiked through dusty passes with the girls, stopping every now and then to help them take off their backpacks, placing our hands on thier warm moist shoulders and gazing off at papaya sunsets." (169)
"..we long for some shred of evidence, some Rosetta stone that would explain the girls at last." (170)
"..she stared at a patch of sky visible through a lace of spiderweb. That was as much of the girls' world as she could see, just the same sky above their house but it told her enough... Don't waste your time on life.." (173)
"..just the sound of water we couldn't imagine the color of, sloshing around." (174)
"..the girls had engineered a phantasmagoria of beacons." (191)
"In the end, the answer was so simple, it took a week to come up with." (193)
"Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy." (231)
"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...It had to do with the way the mail wasn't delivered on time, and how potholes never got fixed, or the thievery at City Hall, or the race riots, or the 801 fires set around the city on Devil's night. The Lisbon girls became a symbol of what was wrong with the country, the pain it inflected on even its most innocent citizens.." (231)
"Asphyxiation." (234)
"..tragedy had beaten them into mindless submission." (239)
"..gradually a sea change took place, so that the girls were seen not as scapegoats but as seers." (244)
"..the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusla to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws." (245)