How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"Twenty-one. Handsome. Beautiful on violin."
"How?"
"Bridge nearby. Swift current."
"How get over?"
"Never will." (4.72-76)
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.
Quote #2
In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life. She couldn't understand how the Lisbons kept so quiet, why they didn't wail to heaven or go mad. (4.91)
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.
Quote #3
The newspapers, later writing about what they termed a "suicide pact," treated the girls as automatons, creatures so barely alive that their deaths came as little change. (4.93)
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.
Quote #4
How long we stayed like that, communing with her departed spirit, we can't remember. Long enough for our collective breath to start a breeze through the room that made Bonnie twist on her rope. She spun slowly, and at one point her face broke out of the seaweed of balloons, showing us the reality of the death she'd chosen. It was a world of blackening eye sockets, blood pooling in lower extremities, stiffening joints. (4.207)
The boys believe that they are rescuing the Lisbon girls on the night of their suicides, but instead the sisters involve the boys as witnesses to their terrible deaths. Bonnie, hanging in the room where they'd partied only a year before, brings home the horrible reality of death. It's a traumatizing sight; they don't see the "peaceful" aftermath of an overdose or carbon monoxide death, but the more gruesome result of a hanging. (The film spares us those visual details, btw.)
Quote #5
As for the other girls, autopsies were performed on each of them, in accordance with a state law requiring investigation in all deaths by suicide. [. . .] A single coroner, brought from the city with two fatigued assistants, opened up the girls' brains and body cavities, peering inside at the mystery of their despair. (5.5)
The girls' young bodies aren't damaged (besides the self-inflicted injuries that cause their deaths), so the image of the coroner looking in their brains and bodies for a sign of why they died is almost absurd. The message is that the reason for their suicides is beyond anything the coroner can see.
Quote #6
After the suicide free-for-all, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon gave up the attempt to lead a normal life. Mrs. Lisbon stopped attending church, and when Father Moody went to the house to console her, no one answered the door. (5.9)
This is all we need to know about the effects of the deaths on Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon. They withdraw completely.
Quote #7
It was full-fledged summer once again, over a year from the time Cecilia had slit her wrists, spreading the poison in the air. A spill at the River Rouge Plant increased phosphates in the lake, producing a scum of algae so thick it clogged outboard engines. Our beautiful lake began to look like a lily pond, carpeted with an undulating foam. (5.21)
Cecilia's suicide is compared in this metaphor to a spill at the Ford automobile factory, as though her death wish was contagious, killing her sisters and contaminating the community just like the algae spread over Lake St. Clair. The polluted lake is dead, too.
Quote #8
She had on so much makeup that the paramedics had the odd feeling she had already been prepared for viewing by an undertaker, and this impression lasted until they saw that her lipstick and eyeshadow were smudged. She had clawed herself a little, at the end. She was dressed in a black dress and veil […].(5.29)
Mary, the last Lisbon girl to die, becomes her own undertaker, dressing as if for her own funeral—heavy makeup and a black veil—before overdosing on pills. The smudges suggest to the narrators that her body tried to fight off death in her last minutes. The image of the dead Mary is in ironic contrast to Mary's longtime love of makeup, which was her way of exploring womanhood and was a kind of life-affirming interest. She finally got to wear it in public.
Quote #9
As luck would have it, on the day of Mary's suicide, the cemetery worker's strike was settled after 409 days of arbitration. The strike's length had caused mortuaries to fill up months ago, and the many bodies awaiting burial now came back from out of state, in refrigerated trucks, or by airplane, depending on the wealth of the deceased. (5.31)
The strike means that no one has been buried in the city for over a year. Because it ends on the day of Mary's death, all five sisters are buried together in a single ceremony. It's interesting that social class affects even the dead—the rich cadavers travel in style, while the poorer ones are trucked in. The stark death imagery really starts piling up in the novel after the sisters' suicides.