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Lux Lisbon
Bonnie is the middle Lisbon sister. She’s 15 when Cecilia takes her own life. As the middle child, she is somewhat reserved and doesn’t necessarily attract much attention, though this is also possibly because she is—it seems—something of a rule follower. As such, it’s surprising when she ends up kissing Joe Hill Conley beneath the bleachers at the homecoming dance. She finds herself in this situation after following Lux and Trip Fontaine around, apparently not knowing what else to do at the dance and not feeling comfortable with the idea of letting her sister out of her sight. Joe Hill Conley follows, too, and after they watch Trip and Lux drink peach schnapps and kiss, they decide to do the same—Bonnie is hesitant at first, but Lux tells her not to be a “goody-goody.” At the end of the novel, the neighborhood boys find Bonnie’s lifeless body hanging from the ceiling in the basement.
Bonnie Lisbon Quotes in The Virgin Suicides
The The Virgin Suicides quotes below are all either spoken by Bonnie Lisbon or refer to Bonnie Lisbon. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
The paneled walls gleamed, and for the first few seconds the Lisbon girls were only a patch of glare like a congregation of angels. Then, however, our eyes got used to the light and informed us of something we had never realized: the Lisbon girls were all different people. Instead of five replicas with the same blond hair and puffy cheeks we saw that they were distinct beings, their personalities beginning to transform their faces and reroute their expressions.
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Chapter 4
Quotes
Thinking back, we decided the girls had been trying to talk to us all along, to elicit our help, but we’d been too infatuated to listen. Our surveillance had been so focused we missed nothing but a simple returned gaze. Who else did they have to turn to? Not their parents. Nor the neighborhood. Inside their house they were prisoners; outside, lepers. And so they hid from the world, waiting for someone—for us—to save them.
We climbed up to the tree house the way we always had, stepping in the knothole, then on the nailed board, then on two bent nails, before grasping the frayed rope and pulling ourselves through the trapdoor. We were so much bigger now we could barely squeeze through, and once we were inside, the plywood floor sagged under our weight. The oblong window we’d cut with a handsaw years ago still looked onto the front of the Lisbon house. Next to it were rusty tacks. We didn’t remember putting them up, but there they were, dim from time and weather so that all we could make out were the phosphorescent outlines of the girls’ bodies, each a different glowing letter of an unknown alphabet.
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It took a minute to sink in. We gazed up at Bonnie, at her spindly legs in their white confirmation stockings, and the shame that has never gone away took over. The doctors we later consulted attributed our response to shock. But the mood felt more like guilt, like coming to attention at the last moment and too late, as though Bonnie were murmuring the secret not only of her death but of her life itself, of all the girls’ lives.
Get the entire The Virgin Suicides LitChart as a printable PDF.
Bonnie Lisbon Quotes in The Virgin Suicides
The The Virgin Suicides quotes below are all either spoken by Bonnie Lisbon or refer to Bonnie Lisbon. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
The paneled walls gleamed, and for the first few seconds the Lisbon girls were only a patch of glare like a congregation of angels. Then, however, our eyes got used to the light and informed us of something we had never realized: the Lisbon girls were all different people. Instead of five replicas with the same blond hair and puffy cheeks we saw that they were distinct beings, their personalities beginning to transform their faces and reroute their expressions.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4
Quotes
Thinking back, we decided the girls had been trying to talk to us all along, to elicit our help, but we’d been too infatuated to listen. Our surveillance had been so focused we missed nothing but a simple returned gaze. Who else did they have to turn to? Not their parents. Nor the neighborhood. Inside their house they were prisoners; outside, lepers. And so they hid from the world, waiting for someone—for us—to save them.
We climbed up to the tree house the way we always had, stepping in the knothole, then on the nailed board, then on two bent nails, before grasping the frayed rope and pulling ourselves through the trapdoor. We were so much bigger now we could barely squeeze through, and once we were inside, the plywood floor sagged under our weight. The oblong window we’d cut with a handsaw years ago still looked onto the front of the Lisbon house. Next to it were rusty tacks. We didn’t remember putting them up, but there they were, dim from time and weather so that all we could make out were the phosphorescent outlines of the girls’ bodies, each a different glowing letter of an unknown alphabet.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
It took a minute to sink in. We gazed up at Bonnie, at her spindly legs in their white confirmation stockings, and the shame that has never gone away took over. The doctors we later consulted attributed our response to shock. But the mood felt more like guilt, like coming to attention at the last moment and too late, as though Bonnie were murmuring the secret not only of her death but of her life itself, of all the girls’ lives.
