The Virgin Suicides

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.

We'll have fun without you"

The flagpole that had flown at half-mast the day Cecilia died, though it had been summer and no one but the lawn crew had noticed

Everybody had a story as to why she tried to kill herself. Mrs. Buell said the parents were to blame. "That girl didn't want to die," she told us. "She just wanted out of that house." Mrs. Scheer added, "she wanted out of that decorating scheme."

The small statue of a girl… donated in memory of Laura White, her bronze skirt just beginning to oxidize. Scars crossed her welded wrists, symbolically, but the Lisbon girls didn't notice.

I knew I had to close that window or else she'd go on jumping out of it forever."

A series of dissolves, their house, street, city, country, and finally planet, which not only dwarfs but obliterates them.

The girls were right in choosing to love Trip, because he was the only boy who could keep his mouth shut.

We realised that the version of the world they had rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass, they didn't give a damn about lawns.

We realized that our fathers, brothers and uncles had been lying, and that .no one was ever going to love us for our good grades.

None of my daughters lacked for any love. We had plenty of love in our house."

They knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all.

We had never known them. They had brought us here to find that out.

Obviously, Doctor… you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl."

We asked Father Moody whether he had discussed Cecilia's death or the girls' grief, but he said he hadn't.

The blue slate roof… visibly darkened. The yellow bricks turned brown… There were other signs of creeping desolation. The illuminated doorbell went out. The bird feeder fell in the back yard and was left on the ground… Mrs Higbie insisted that Mr Lisbon, using a long pole, had closed the outside shutters.

Cecilia's party had never been cleaned up. The paper tablecloth, spotted with mice droppings… A brownish scum of punch… sprinkled with flies… A profusion of withered balloons hung from the ceiling… The domino game still called for a three or a seven.

The room's changes- water bugs adhering to walls, one bobbing dead mouse- only heightened what hadn't changed

You don't understand me… I'm a teenager. I've got problems!

Vince Fusilli held up his lighter… It was the best we could do for an eternal flame.

So much has been written about the girls in the newspapers, so much has been said over back-yard fences, or related over the years in psychiatrists' offices, that we are certain only of the insufficiency of explanations.