25 The Virgin Suicides Quotes From the Popular Book That Was Adapted Into a Movie

If you enjoy dramatic psychological fiction, check out these The Virgin Suicides quotes.

The Virgin Suicides is the first novel by author Jeffrey Eugenides and falls into the psychological drama genre.

The book was first published in 1993 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and the popularity of the book led to the novel being adapted into a movie in 1999.

The book’s plot follows the Lisbon family, which consists of five beautiful teenage girls living with their parents in the middle-class town of Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

Teenage boys in the neighborhood are in love with the Lisbon girls, and when the youngest, 13-year-old Cecilia, attempts to commit suicide without warning, one of the neighborhood boys finds her and saves her.

But a therapist tells the parents that the girls need more social interaction and that Cecilia may have attempted suicide due to her suppressed libidinal urges.

Take a look at these The Virgin Suicide quotes to learn more about the book.

The Virgin Suicides Quotes That Stick With You

Here are some memorable lines from The Virgin Suicides.

1. “All wisdom ends in paradox.” — Jeffrey Eugenides

2. “The time has to be right and the heart willing.” — Jeffrey Eugenides

3. “They’re just memories now. Time to write them off.” — Jeffrey Eugenides

4. “Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.” — Jeffrey Eugenides

5. “I don’t know what you’re feeling. I won’t even pretend.” — Jeffrey Eugenides

6. “The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season.” — Jeffrey Eugenides

7. “Grief is natural,’ she said. ‘Overcoming it is a matter of choice.” — Jeffrey Eugenides

8. “You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn’t bother you so much.” — Jeffrey Eugenides

9. “In the end, it wasn’t death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.” — Jeffrey Eugenides

10. “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

Heavy The Virgin Suicides Quotes

The journey throughout the film is dark and heavy, as shown in the following quotes.

11. “What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.” — Jeffrey Eugenides

12. “She held herself very straight like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize, and men never think about.” — Jeffrey Eugenides

13. “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

14. “We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.” — Jeffrey Eugenides

15. “In the end, we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptiness mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name.” — Jeffrey Eugenides

16. “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

17. “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

The Virgin Suicide Quotes that Tell the Story

Get more of a glimpse into the book and film with the following quotes.

18. “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

19. “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

20. “But now — I have lost my gift. It’s as if my quill is broken as if the organ of my imagination has dried up as if the proud -illegible word- of my genius has collapsed.” — Jeffrey Eugenides

21. “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

22. “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

Additional Quotes from The Virgin Suicides

Here are a few more quotes about death and suicide.

23. “That girl didn’t want to die. She just wanted out of that house. She wanted out of that decorating scheme.” — Jeffrey Eugenides

24. “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

25. “They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. If the need, 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

What Happens to the Lisbon Girls?

The parents help the girls throw a chaperoned party, but Cecilia sneaks away and commits suicide.

The teenage boys continue to watch the strange behavior over the next year, and on the anniversary of Cecilia’s death, the boys are invited over to find the remaining four girls have killed themselves in a suicide pact.

Share these The Virgin Suicides quotes with your psychological drama-loving friends and post any comments about the book in the comment section below.