#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 #death

Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life. ↗

— Vaclav Havel

#guardians #i #i wonder #in fact #life

I've seen schizophrenics who are so hopeless, you couldn't cheer them, and their lives are miserable and they end up as suicides. That's not right. ↗

— Jack Kevorkian

#end #hopeless #i #lives #miserable

Is it hard for the reader to believe that suicides are sometimes committed to forestall the committing of murder? There is no doubt of it. Nor is there any doubt that murder is sometimes committed to avert suicide. ↗

— Karl A. Menninger

#avert #believe #committed #committing #doubt

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. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#virgin-suicides #imagination

Even our parents seemed agree more and more with the television version of things, listening to the reporters' inanities as though they could tell us the truth about our own lives ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#philosophical #the-virgin-suicides #life

Nine men in ten are would be suicides. ↗

— Benjamin Franklin

#nine #suicides #ten #would

Among [Applewhite's] other teachings was the classic cult specialty of developing disdain for anyone outside of the Heaven's Gate commune. Applewhite flattered his would-be alien flock that they were an elite elect far superior to the non-initiated humans whom he considered to be deluded zombies.[...]Applewhite effectively fed his paranoid persecution complex to his followers to ensure blind loyalty to the group and himself while fostering alienation from the mundane world. This paradoxical superior/fearful attitude towards “Them” (i.e., anyone who is not one of “Us”) is one of the simplest means of hooking even the most skeptical curiosity seeker into the solipsistic netherworld of a [mentally unbalanced] leader's insecure and threatened worldview. ↗

— Zeena Schreck

#mass-suicides #psychopathology #religious-science-fiction #sects #sociology

Virgin suicide What was that she cried? No use in stayin' On this holocaust ride She gave me her cherry She's my virgin suicide ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#lyrics #music #sex #suicide #the-virgin-suicides

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. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#about #been #found #gave #had