The Virgin Suicides

I just finished reading The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides and it will be far too hard for me to convey to you how much I loved this book.

Loved, loved, loved.

Eugenides' combines the common elements of humor and grief into something beautiful and rare.

I definitely recommend this book.

Here are some quotes that I found particularly captivating:

"All wisdom ends in a paradox." (p. 246)

"They had killed themselves over the dying forests; over the manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they 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. In the end, 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." (p. 245)

"The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. 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." (p. 248)

"What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time." (p. 175)

Writing about prostate self exams: "And so we lie on our backs, probing, recoiling, probing again, and the seeds of death get lost in the mess God made us." (p. 170)

"We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. 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." (p. 44)