“I, being the girls’ mother, should understand them more than anyone. But that's what's so frightening. I don't know. Once they're out of you, they're different, kids are. Leaving their home, they will become another's.”
This quote directly presents to the reader a slice of Mrs. Lisbon's perspective. Even after her girls committed suicide, she is still loyal to her beliefs and ideals, which were a large catalyst to the girls' deaths. She does not realize her own role in her daughters' deaths; instead, she believes she understood them "more than anyone" and refuses to recognize what went wrong. Not only does this develop Mrs. Lisbon's characterization as an overbearing mother whose household policies were extremely misguided, but it also shows how her fears at losing her daughters overrode any potential love for them as their own individuals.
“That girl didn't want to die. She just wanted out of that house. She wanted out of that decorating scheme.”
Following Cecilia Lisbon's suicide, the entire community attempts to parse out why she would have killed herself. While Mrs. Lisbon (in the quote above) refuses to recognize her own role in their death, others, like Mrs. Buell, are convinced that it was Cecilia's home life that drove her to suicide. Barred from being a teenager (in the modern sense of the word) by her mother's strict rules, Cecilia escaped in the only way that she knew how—or so thinks Mrs. Buell.
This quote highlights how the community knew what was going on in the Lisbon household and how the parents' stringency affected the girls, but were helpless to stop the events from unfolding. Cecilia's death becomes a statement against her household's smothering rules, and while this statement alerts the community to the extremism of the Lisbon house's policies, it also isolates the Lisbons from the rest of the community due to stigmas surrounding suicide. Mrs. Buell's quote marks the growing awareness of the community to the Lisbon girls' plight, as well as the simultaneous development of a barrier between the Lisbons and the rest of the community.
"The window was still open," Mr. Lisbon said. "I don't think we'd ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close that window or else she'd go on jumping out of it forever."
Mr. Lisbon recounts a memory of walking through the house late one night and imagining his daughter Cecilia jumping out of the window to her death again. Without realizing that it is a different daughter who is standing in her nightgown, he goes to close it, thinking that Cecilia will remain there forever jumping to her death if he doesn't do something about it. Not only does this underscore how the dead never leave the living, but it also represents Mr. Lisbon's pitiful nature as he tries to prevent a tragedy he is too late to stop. The Lisbon girls' suicides haunt the people of the community long after they pass away, as indicated by the narrator and his friends' obsession with them in this investigative account written years later, and this quote highlights how the girls' fates have reduced their father into a helpless figure unable to fulfill a core aspect of being a parent: protecting his young.
Sometimes we caught sight of tattered knee socks rounding a corner, or came upon them doubled over, shoving books into a cubbyhole, flicking the hair out of their eyes. But it was always the same: their white faces drifting in slow motion past us, while we pretended we hadn't been looking for them at all, that we didn't know they existed.
Throughout the novel, the boys constantly struggle to become close with the girls. While the girls tend to keep to themselves and are often unable to be distinguished from each other, the boys constantly try—and fail—to earn more than just a glimpse of "tattered knee socks" and other signs of their presence. This quote indicates how the boys never get to a level of deep understanding regarding the girls, still finding it difficult to identify them distinctly after all these years, and underscores the theme of isolation that pervades the work.
This quote also develops the theme of vision. While the boys always see just a little bit of the girls, they also pretend to not see them when the girls walk past. This facade of disinterest perpetuates the barrier between them and the girls, as they show no signs for the girls to pick up on and reciprocate. Additionally, they only see bits of the girls, and not what they actually should be seeing, which is the bigger picture that they are being repressed and need help. This prevents them from helping the girls to shoulder their burden, and because the boys are unable to share in their suffering, they are unable to save them from death. The importance of vision, and what is seen vs. what needs to be seen, is a large part of the novel that propels the ambiguous nature of the boys' account.
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.
This is the last line in The Virgin Suicides and is a direct view into the boys' perspective—not the girls', as is the case with several other parts of the book. However, the striking aspect of this quote is that they emphasize their "calling" and the inability of the girls to hear them "up here in the tree house." After all these years, they continue to call to the girls who killed themselves for reasons that the boys cannot begin to understand, and this line shows their direct recognition of their inability to move on. While the rest of the novel implicitly indicates how the Lisbon girls' suicides have haunted the boys ever since, the concluding line shows that they understand the girls' impact on them, but do not expect to be able to move on from it.
This line also develops the image of the boys losing their connection to the girls. As time progresses, they are increasingly unable to recall their memories of the Lisbons and grow even more distant than they were at the time of their death. Their "thinning hair and soft bellies" indicate their age as well as the difference between themselves and the people they were when the Lisbons were alive, showing how they've lost the pieces of themselves that they could cling to as proof that they were present during the time when the Lisbons girls were still part of the community. Additionally, their maturation into middle-aged men adds another level of tragedy as it highlights how they are increasingly unable to "find the pieces to put them back together," because they are fading from that point in time. While they still go to the tree house—a symbol of youth—they are no longer youthful, pointing to a futile attempt to remain in that point in time when the Lisbons were all still alive. All of this death—the death of the boys as boys, the death of the remnants of the Lisbons, the death of that time period—reflects the motif of decay and destruction throughout the novel, and underscores how there is no such thing as permanence in the world of The Virgin Suicides.
