We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.

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.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly

It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

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.

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.

You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.

It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.

I want you to let go. Just close your eyes and feel me. Don't think. Don't try to control it. All you have to do... is feel.

If the deaf are to hear the sound has to be very loud

Earth ... God's golf ball.

I am not faithful but I am attached.

The way that I work is that I try to work in metaphors, and you can't write a metaphor unless you know where you're going, so I always think about the future.

Don't be silly. I'm a mature, intelligent woman. Of course I'm afraid of my mother.

Let not his mode of raising cash seem strange, Although he fleeced the flags of every nation, For into a prime minister but change His title, and 'tis nothing but taxation.

I guess I've always been attracted to secret societies and the mystery surrounding them.

Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?

'Tis not to make me jealous To say my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company, Is free of speech, sings, plays, and dances well; Where virtue is, these are more virtuous.