Ms. Corlies
Period
The Virgin Suicides
Notes and Quotes
1. -– “On the morning the last Lisbon girl took her turn at suicide” (3) – not simply doubling, but completing one
another – suicide and depression
2. “Cecilia, the youngest, only thirteen, had gone first, slitting her wrists like a Stoic while taking a bath” (3). Suicide
and depression
3. Cecilia’s first suicide attempt has her clutching, “the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary she held against her
budding chest” (4). – Influence of religion
4... -people do not understand why – “you’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets” (7) - psychology
5. “‘Obviously, Doctor,’ she said, ‘you’ve never been a thirteen year old girl.” (13) – depression
6. “He had long harbored doubts about his wife’s strictness, knowing in his heart that girls forbidden to dance would
only attract husbands with bad complexions and sunken chests. Also, the odor of all those cooped girls had begun to
annoy him”
(23). – Family relationships
7. “We didn’t understand why Cecelia had killed herself the first time and we understood even less when she did it
twice” (32). – Suicide and depression
8. -“…protect us from the contamination of tragedy” (38). Family relationships
9. “Unlike us, Trip Fontaine never mixed up the Lisbon girls, but from the outset saw Lux as their shining pinnacle”
(79) – female perception
10. Lux, “the most naked person with clothes on he [Trip} had ever seen” (79).-female perception
11. “They had always suspected Cecelia to meet a bad end” (112). – Family relationships
12. Night of the dance, “Fortunately, their dresses and hairdos homogenized them. Once again, the boys weren’t even
sure which girl was which” (122) – female perception
13. The girls are actually watching back – “…they had been looking out at us as intensely as we had been looking in”
(124). Female perception
14. “Cecilia was weird, but we’re not…We just want to live. If anyone would let us” (132). -depression
15. Imprisonment – “the old bitch had locked them up again” (139) – house as prison
16. “I liked her. I really liked her. I just got sick of her right then” (139). – Family relationships
17. they becomes “stuck,” even in love, “And we’d have to admit too, that in our most intimate moments, alone at
night with our beating hearts, asking God to save us, what comes most often is Lux, succubus of those binocular
nights” (147) – female perception
18. “Her suicide, from this perspective, was seen as a kind of disease infecting those close at hand”
(157). psychology
19. “but that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that
time than a survival room buried inside a house itself becoming one big coffin” (163) – house as prison
20. “And so they hid from the world, waiting for someone – for us – to save them” (199). – Female perception
21. Girls still possess it after their death, “…the exhalations of the Lisbon girls that still lived in bedding and drapes, in
peeling wallpaper, in patches of carpet preserved brand-new beneath dressers and nightstands” (227). – house as
prison
22. Unchanged by time – “Cecilia’s party had never been cleaned up” (214). – Family relationships
23. “We had never known her. They had brought us here to find that out” (215). - Psychology
24. “the Lisbon girls became a symbol of what was wrong with the country, the pain it inflicted upon even it’s most
innocent citizens, and in order to make things better a parents’ group donated a bench in the girls’ memory to our
school” (231). Suicide and depression
25. “The Lisbon girls made suicide familiar” (244) – psychology
26. give explanations that may/may not be accurate – “but even as we make these conclusions, we feel our throats
plugging up, because they are both true and untrue” (247) - psychology