Abigail > Abigail's Quotes

“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.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, 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.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets."

And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had 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.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“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.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too. ”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“The time has to be right and the heart willing.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“The zipper opened all the way down our spines.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“We had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us... 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.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“The trees like lungs filling with air
My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“All wisdom ends in paradox.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Headache is always preferable to heartache, and if you’re focusing on not throwing up, you aren’t thinking about how the friends of your youth are dying around you.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

“I am never sure what to think of Americans. Their brashness can be charming, but just when I decide that I rather like them, I meet one that I wish would go back to America, and then perhaps keep going off the far edge, into the sea.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

“Look, if you don't make a fool of yourself over animals, at least in private, you aren't to be trusted.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

“If we don’t pretend we’re laughing, we might have to admit just how broken we are.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

“People get hung up on happiness and joy, but fun will take you at least as far and it's generally cheaper to obtain.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.
To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?" "Yes," I said.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger