A character in The Virgin Suicides (2000)

Narrator quotes from The Virgin Suicides (2000)

Giovanni Ribisi

Most-quoted character in The Virgin Suicides (2000): in 9 of its 21 quotes

A line from Narrator

In the end we had 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. What lingered after them was not life, but the most trivial list of mundane facts. A clock ticking on the wall, a room dim at noon, the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.

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Narrator

We knew 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.

Narrator

We knew that they knew everything about us, and that we couldn't fathom them at all.

Narrator

No one could understand how Mrs. Lisbon and Mr. Lisbon, our math teacher, could produce such beautiful creatures.

Narrator

Collecting everything we could of theirs, the Lisbon girls wouldn't leave our minds but they were slipping away. The color of their eyes was fading along with the exact locations... of moles and dimples. From five, they had become four, and they were all the living and the dead, becoming shadows. We would have lost them completely if the girls hadn't contacted us.

Narrator

Almost every day, and even when she wasn't keeping an eye on Cecilia, Lux would suntan wearing a swimsuit that caused the knife sharpener to give her a 15-minute demonstration for free.

Narrator

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy. And how you ended up knowing what colors went together.

Narrator

Given Lux's failure to make curfew everyone expected a crackdown, but few anticipated it would be so drastic. The girls were taken out of school, and Mrs. Lisbon shut the house in maximum-security isolation.

Narrator

So much has been said about the girls over the years. But we have never found an answer. 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 calling them from out of those rooms... where they went to be alone for all time... and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.

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