The Virgin Suicides

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

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.

She was the still point of the turning world, man.

When she jumped, she probably thought she could fly.

Palazzolo jumped off the roof over that rich bitch Porter. How stupid can you be?

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.

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.

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.

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

[voiceover, reading from her diary] The trees, like lungs, filling with air. My sister - the mean one - pulling my hair.

I liked her a lot, but it was different out on the field. I never saw her again.