Virgin Suicides Mortality Quotes

This conversation over ham radio between Therese and a Colombian stranger shows the universal difficulty of surviving a sibling's suicide. The short, choppy sentences show the way that amateur radio operators talk to one another, since they're communicating with Morse code, and make the deep sadness and complex emotions conveyed even more powerful in contrast.

Old Mrs. Karafilis, the Greek grandmother of one of the narrators, has lived through extreme trauma in her long life. She doesn't speak English, but does understand the goings-on in the neighborhood; the way that Americans deal with (or actually don't deal with) the suicides mystifies her. That's not how things are done in the old country. Grief there is loud and public; the Lisbons keep it underground.

Once the girls are dead, it's as though they had never existed as real, individual human beings. For one thing, they're collapsed into a unit: the girls. For another, their deaths are understood as almost inevitable, as though they were broken, doomed to die. Perhaps that's the only way their fellow citizens can wrap their heads around the tragedy—to depersonalize the sisters. The narrators have much more information about the community's reaction to the deaths than they do about the suicides themselves. You could say that this is the real story of the novel—how a community deals with a tragedy like this.