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.

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.

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.

She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.

Where is my oasis? Too far fromhere for me to crawl with thesedead legs, refusing to co-operateHands and fingers clawing uselesslythrough the grains of sand...

Flowers wither knowing that you exist.

Superabundant piety/righteousness (and its practices) is that form of life that enhances the individual and the community simultaneously.

The best paths in life are rarely the easiest.

Green how I want you green. Green wind. Green branches.

Criticism sometimes is really praise, and praise sometimes slander.

When you look up. Do you see the blue sky of what might be? Or the darkness of what will never be? Do you see me?

Every end is the beginning of something else.

Let the ideas clash, let the swords sleep!

In the end, the gesture of painting becomes almost meditative, like a ritual.