trip fontaine quotes

Trip Fontaine

Character analysis.

Trip Fontaine's the best developed of the male characters in the novel. The narrators know Trip from boyhood as a pudgy, weird-looking kid, but in the year before the suicides, he "had emerged from baby fat to the delight of girls and women alike" (3.32). Trip gets a lot of ink in the novel, because the boys are amazed at how girls throw themselves at him, but more important, because he turns out to be their intro to the Lisbon sisters.

Trip has an exotic history. He becomes the school heartthrob after a trip to Acapulco with his father and his father's boyfriend Donald, where he manages to seduce a 37-year-old woman at a hotel bar. Or rather, she seduces him. He comes back to school as a tall, deep-voiced golden boy who drives the girls crazy:

Before long he lived like a pasha, accepting tribute at the court of his synthetic coverlet: small bills filched from mothers' purses, bags of dope, graduation rings, Rice Krispie treats wrapped in wax paper, vials of amyl nitrate […] (3.35)

Trip starts a thriving drug-dealing business and leaves school three times a day to smoke weed in his car. The boys are fascinated by him. Trip's father ignores the parade of girls to Trip's bedroom. The boys think it's probably because the "iffiness of his own conduct" (3.35), i.e. being gay in the 1970s in a conservative suburb, made him pretty non-judgmental. Trip and his father are more like roommates, floating on air mattresses in the pool, wearing matching peacock robes and towel turbans, getting tanned within an inch of their lives.

The boys admire Trip for never, ever talking about the girls he bedded, unlike most boys who broadcast that stuff to everyone. They figure it's because living with a gay father made him learn to be private about his sex life.

Just saying that they knew Trip Fontaine was enough to make girls grab at the narrators. He was hot:

No boy was ever so cool or aloof. Fontaine gave off the sense of having graduated to the next stage of life, of having his hands thrust into the heart of the real world, whereas the rest of us were still memorizing quotations and grade-grubbing. (3.39)

Trip's cool is blown when he meets Lux. He can't explain it, but he's totally undone the first time he sees her. He's at a loss about what to do—girls always ran after him, so he's not used to having to pursue anyone, especially someone like Lux.

Even the wimpiest boys were more adept than Trip at asking girls out. […] Trip had never even had to dial a girl's phone number. […] He had never felt the pain of lackluster responses, the dread of "Oh… hi," or the quick annihilation of "Who?" His beauty had left him without cunning […]. (3.50)

Trip can't understand why Lux affects him like that. He describes it to the boys in terms of auras and atoms breaking apart; the boys attribute that to his always being high. Anyway, he finally tells Lux he's going to ask her father to take her out. He spends a quiet evening at the Lisbon house not even sitting next to Lux, but after he leaves she follows him to the car and jumps on him:

Even though that lightning attack lasted only three minutes, it left its mark on him. He spoke of it as one might speak of a religious experience, a visitation or vision, any rupture into this life fro beyond that cannot be described in words. "Sometimes I think I dreamed it," he told us […] (3.58)

Lux is grounded after that night, and Trip has to wait until next fall, when he persuades Mr. Lisbon to let the girls go to the Homecoming dance on a group date so he can be with Lux. This is a big breakthrough for the lucky boys who Trip picks to take the other three sisters. Of course, Trip and Lux get named King and Queen of the prom. He and Lux sneak off after the dance and have sex on the football field, but after she starts to cry in the middle of it, he suddenly gets turned off and leaves her there. It's inexplicable.

"I walked home that night. I didn't care how she got home. I just took off." Then, "It's weird. I mean, I liked her. I really liked her. I just got sick of her just then." (3.222)

The boys don't learn about this until years later. They know that Lux missed curfew that night and brought on the imprisonment in their house that doomed the sisters, but they didn't know why she didn't make it home. By the time they get around to interviewing Trip about his relationship with Lux, he's spent years in rehab and looks way the worse for wear. He's got the shakes and his skin is yellow. Listen and learn, Shmoopers: drugs are bad, m'kay?

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The Virgin Suicides

• Narrator : [ Narration ] In the end we had pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained. Oddly shaped emptiness mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name. What lingered after them was not life, but the most trivial list of mundane facts. A clock ticking on the wall, a room dim at noon, the *outrageousness* of a human being thinking only of herself.
• Doctor : What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets.
• Cecilia : Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl.
• Narrator : We knew 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.
• Tim Weiner : What we have here is a dreamer. Someone completely out of touch with reality.
• Narrator : So much has been said about the girls over the years. But we have never found an answer. It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls... but only that we had loved them... and that they hadn't heard us calling... still do not hear us calling them from out of those rooms... where they went to be alone for all time... and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.
• Adult Trip Fontaine : She was the still point of the turning world, man.
• Trip Fontaine : You're a stone fox.
• Narrator : Collecting everything we could of theirs, the Lisbon girls wouldn't leave our minds but they were slipping away. The color of their eyes was fading along with the exact locations... of moles and dimples. From five, they had become four, and they were all the living and the dead, becoming shadows. We would have lost them completely if the girls hadn't contacted us.
• Narrator : What lingered after them was not life, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.
• Cecilia : [ voiceover, reading from her diary ] Lux lost it over Kevin Haynes, the garbageman. She'd wake up at 5 in the morning and lay about on the front porch like it wasn't completely obvious! She wrote his name in marker in all her bras and underwear and mum found them and bleached out all the Kevins. Lux has been crying on her bed all day
• Principal Woodhouse : Your daughters haven't been in school for over two weeks.
• Mr. Lisbon : Have you checked out back?
• Tim Weiner : When she jumped, she probably thought she could fly.
• Cecilia : [ voiceover, reading from her diary ] The trees, like lungs, filling with air. My sister - the mean one - pulling my hair.
• Narrator : We knew that they knew everything about us,and that we couldn't fathom them at all.
• Mrs. Buell : That girl didn't want to die, she just wanted out of that house.
• Mrs. Scheer : She wanted out of that decorating scheme.
• Narrator : Given Lux's failure to make curfew everyone expected a crackdown, but few anticipated it would be so drastic. The girls were taken out of school, and Mrs. Lisbon shut the house in maximum-security isolation.
• Narrator : No one could understand how Mrs. Lisbon and Mr. Lisbon, our math teacher, could produce such beautiful creatures.
• Narrator : We would never be sure of the sequence of events. We argue about it still.
• Narrator : We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy. And how you ended up knowing what colors went together.
• Narrator : We felt the imprisonment of being a girl.
• Narrator : In the end, Parkie won because of the Cadillac, Kevin Head because he had the killer weed, and Joe Hill Conley because he won all the school prizes which Trip thought would impress Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon.
• Doctor : Tell me what these remind you of
• [ holds up an ink blot card ]
• Cecilia : A banana.
• [ the doctor holds up another ink blot card ]
• Cecilia : A swamp.
• Cecilia : An afro.
• Lady in car : Those girls have a bright future ahead of them. The other one was just going to end up a kook.
• Rannie : I baked a pie full of rat poison. I though I could eat it, you know, without being suspicious. My nana, who is 86...
• [ starts to break down ]
• Rannie : she really likes sweets. She had three pieces.
• Jake Hill Conley : [ pokes hole in the cigarette smoke ring that Lux blows ] Don't let it die a virgin.
• Tim Weiner : Look, she's laughing, he made her laugh.
• Mr. Lisbon : [ talking to his plants ] Have we photosynthesized our breakfast today?
• Lux Lisbon : I can't breath in here.
• Mrs Lisbon : Lu, you are safe, in here.
• Chase Buell : Man, this girl's makin' me crazy. Couldn't we just feel one of 'em up just once?
• Trip Fontaine : You'll love it.
• Trip Fontaine : Peach schnapps.
• Trip Fontaine : [ Voice over ] Babes love it.
• Lux Lisbon : That stuff tastes really good.
• Mrs Lisbon : None of my daughters lacked for any love, there was plenty of love in our household. I never understood why.

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“The Virgin Suicides” Still Holds the Mysteries of Adolescence

By Emma Cline

I still own the copy of “ The Virgin Suicides ” that I first read in high school, the evidence of my teen-age self on its pages: water-rippled from many hours in the bath, stained with juice from the tangerines I used to eat in great quantities. It’s a book I’ve read many times now, but I still remember that original encounter, how it felt like a flare from my own secret world, all the inchoate longings and obsessions of being a teen-ager somehow rendered into book form. Even the five Lisbon sisters seemed like some mirror of me and my four younger sisters—I knew the peculiarity of a household filled with girls, the feverish swapping of clothes, the rituals and ablutions, experiencing adolescence like some long-standing illness from which we all suffered. The world of “The Virgin Suicides” was gothic and mundane, just like the world of teen-agers, with our desire to catalogue and make meaning out of any sign or symbol, even the mildest of occurrences taking on great portent. It was exhausting to live that way, believing in the significance of every feeling, tracking every minor emotional shift. But still: sometimes I miss it.

“On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.” From the very first line, the reader understands the Lisbon girls—“daughters”—will all die. The paramedics can easily navigate this last attempt because what should be shocking—a young girl’s suicide—has become, in the strange logic of the Lisbon family, routine. Even the narration is measured, calm, relaying the suicide method with a simple aside. There is no crime for the reader to try to solve, no whodunnit. We know what happens. We know who dies, and how, and by what methods. By giving us this information immediately, with such cool distance, Eugenides directs our attention to different questions, to a different scale of novelistic inquiry. Even when all the unknowns become known, every detail accounted for, every witness interrogated, how much can we ever truly understand our own lives?

In one of the great feats of voice, “The Virgin Suicides” is narrated by a Greek chorus of unnamed men, looking back on their adolescence and the suicides of five girls in their Michigan suburb. The narrators are both elegiac and mordant, dipping in and out of lives, moments, acting as the collective consciousness of an entire neighborhood. The men have never quite moved on—despite their now “thinning hair and soft bellies,” they remain arrested as boys, circling around the lingering mystery of what motivated the girls’ deaths. With procedural effort, they’ve exhaustively catalogued relics from that time (“Exhibits #1 through #97”), conducted interviews with the most minor of neighborhood players, imagined themselves into the heads of the five Lisbon sisters—tried, essentially, to fully animate the past. The book retroactively constructs the eighteen months between the first daughter’s suicide and the last, while the middle-aged narrators obsessively probe a mystery that might never be revealed, the clues only half-legible.

The Lisbon daughters are odd, spectral, starting out as an amorphous and interchangeable mass of five blonde girls, “a patch of glare like a congregation of angels.” In the course of the boys’ careful study, the girls emerge into specificity: dreamy Cecilia, with her lists of endangered animals, her shorn wedding gown; Therese, busy on her ham radio; Bonnie, who kisses with her “frightened eyes wide open”; Mary, dancing with a Kleenex in one hand; Lux, the brashest and most compelling, with her halter tops and “strange gruff laugh.” A different writer might have kept the girls as some manic-pixie fantasy, all surface. But Eugenides gives us glimpses of their real, breathing selves, allows the Lisbon girls the dignity of existing beyond the boys’ conceptions of them, each with an identity that can’t merely be pieced together by an observer, no matter how dedicated. Even as they become specific, studied, obsessed over, the Lisbon girls are never truly revealed, to either the reader or to the boys, who understand that their interest in the girls never gets them any closer to the truth of who the girls are. If anything, the girls become more mysterious, more powerful, forever out of reach. The girls, they say, “knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. 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.”

As a writer, Jeffrey Eugenides builds a world so tight and atmospheric that the book operates like a weather system, with its own distinct logic, or like the closed circuit of an adolescent brain, attuned to signs and symbols, an addictive claustrophobia. Even as Eugenides interrogates the postwar suburban dream, the “dying empire” of a Michigan town, there’s a sense of timelessness, the setting both immediate and otherworldly, toggling between the daily boredoms of teen-agers and a realm almost mythic: when Cecilia slits her wrists, the paramedics with the stretcher are described as “slaves offering the victim to the altar,” Cecilia as “the drugged virgin rising up on her elbows, with an otherworldly smile on her pale lips.” Because the writing is so seamless, it’s easy to fall into its rhythms, to submit to the book as you might to a dream. That’s one deep pleasure of “The Virgin Suicides”—its hyperspecificity, rooms and streets and neighborhoods described in pixelated detail. Every description, every object, feels exactly right, the physical world building on itself like a poem; Lux’s tube top, Cecilia’s prayer card, an Apollo 11 lamp, orange baby aspirin. Even the Lisbons’ grocery list, cadged from a delivery boy, takes on a romantic, gnomic quality. Why do these details—spiked pineapple juice, rosy-pink marble, a dirty canvas tennis shoe—conjure so much? Minor characters are treated with similarly precise and often very funny attention: the perfectly named Trip Fontaine with his assiduous attention to tanning and his jarred collection of “Great Reefers of the World,” who was deflowered by a Las Vegas poker dealer while on vacation in Acapulco. Or Dominic Palazzolo, “the first boy in our neighborhood to wear sunglasses,” who looked “frail, diseased, and temperamental, as we expected a European to look.” Eugenides renders the texture of a time and place as it appears in memory—how a certain smell, an arrangement of objects, a pattern of sunshine and shade as seen from the backseat of a car, can suddenly conjure a past life, waiting beneath the surface.

For the narrators, all this scrupulous attention to detail seems like an attempt at moral irreproachability, an effort to defend their authority to tell the tale of the Lisbon girls. By being unsparing in their trawl through the past, they can forestall charges of narrative agenda or impropriety, as if pure quantity of information could stand in for the truth. Even as these details accumulate—data drawn from every conceivable corner of the neighborhood, every nook of memory—they obscure the larger picture. “Angling Carl Tagel’s telescope out the tree-house window, we managed to see the pockmarked moon steaming silently across space, then blue Venus, but when we turned the telescope on Lux’s window it brought us so close we couldn’t see a thing.” Even the planets, millions of miles away, are more legible to the boys than the girls who live right across the street. When the boys directly communicate with the girls—taking turns playing songs over the phone in halting, mysterious exchanges—the boys write down the song titles, the order in which they’re played, passing the “sticky receiver from ear to ear,” like “pressing our ears to the girls’ chests.”

Only later does it occur to them that the message the girls were sending might not have needed decoding, that all their conspiracy theories and painstaking efforts to crack the supposed code only obscured reality. Maybe the girls had merely wanted connection. “Our surveillance had been so focused we missed nothing but a simple returned gaze.” The details held the truth hostage, preventing any meaningful exchange. Suddenly, the boys become implicated in the fates of the Lisbon sisters, their own projections preventing them from actually knowing the girls: “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.” What the boys have been calling love is actually something closer to estrangement.

The boys aren’t the only ones who misjudge the world around them, perhaps fatally. Their parents—no longer in possession of the moral authority that war confers—have to prove themselves on the meager battlefields of their suburban homes instead, a generalized fear replacing any specific enemy. The source of the possible danger shifts in scope from the global—the threat of nuclear annihilation, pollution, toxic spills—to the local: dead flies crusting over the cars in the neighborhood, trees on the block condemned because of Dutch elm disease. Danger or, rather, death is something external and knowable, and therefore is something that can be prevented—the boys get vaccinations, hold polio sugar cubes under their tongues, caution Cecilia not to touch her mouth to the drinking fountain. Even when Lux breaks curfew, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon believe the problem is situated somewhere out in the world, not in Lux herself, so any threat can be alleviated by essentially jailing their five daughters in the house. According to the Lisbons’ moral logic, home should be the safest place, protected from external dangers, global and local. Then comes the more frightening realization, as in a horror film: the call is coming from inside the house. All the ballast of the suburban world, the tended lawns and the neighbors and the roomy, practical cars, can’t keep the danger away when the source is psychological, a mystery coiled in adolescents themselves, a realm beyond the reach of even the strictest of parents.

The book is an elegy, not only for the dead girls but for the boys’ own adolescent selves. Their relationship with the Lisbons was fundamentally a fantasy, but the intensity and scope of their feelings was real, perhaps more real than anything that followed. After the last Lisbon daughter dies, it’s like a spell is broken: the adult world, with its ordinary disappointments, presses in. “We were slowly carted,” they tell us, “into the melancholic remainder of our lives.” Time betrays them, inevitably, indiscriminately: even Trip Fontaine, once an owner of the most “lustrous father-and-son tan in the city,” turns into a haunted alcoholic, rambling nonsense in a desert rehab. Perhaps by living in the world of the past, cataloguing its every leaving, the boys can maintain that intensity, occupy a domain that doesn’t contain regret and aging and loss. But of course the boys cannot arrest time. They speak of the girls—who died in the full throes of adolescence—with jealousy, as though they were guests who left a party at its peak. Dead girls don’t suffer the unfairness of growing older, don’t see their youth corrode and their memories dim. A couple buys the Lisbon house, turns it into “a sleek empty space for meditation and serenity, covering with Japanese screens the shaggy memories of the Lisbon girls.” Even idolized boys become fallible. “Paul Baldino began to look like any other fat boy with rings around his eyes, and one day he slipped, or was pushed, in the showers at school, and we saw him lying on the tiles, nursing his foot.” The boys’ exhibits, beloved and watched over, are deteriorating: “Mary’s old cosmetics drying out and turning to beige dust . . . Cecilia’s canvas high-tops yellowing beyond remedy of toothbrush and dish soap.” As the boys say, “We haven’t kept our tomb sufficiently airtight, and our sacred objects are perishing.”

The past never leaves us, Eugenides seems to say, it just doubles and exposes, always shifting out of our grasp. The book is an elegy for how life passes through us, changes us. We are subject to its mysterious workings but never given a narrative that satisfies. Any attempt to impose logic doesn’t hold up: there is no memory that doesn’t fuzz around the edges, reveal itself as something else entirely, like Mrs. Lisbon mistaking the flash of sun in a window for the face of a girl long dead. There is basic pain in being sentient, in being witness to the phenomenal existence of the world without any answer as to why. I think of certain lines I circled in “The Virgin Suicides” as a teen-ager—I don’t know what moved my previous self to respond to those particular words, fragments that mean very little to me now. There’s something strange: to be both the teen-ager, feverishly underlining, and the adult, this many years later, who can only look at these illegible markings and wonder at the curious bargain of being alive, the basic self-estrangement of growing up. Like the boys, we can try to solve the mystery of our own adolescence, bridge the gap between all the people we have been, but of course there are no answers. There are no reasons. Maybe the closest we can get are in the images that stay with us, a dying elm on a certain street in a certain town in a certain summer. “It was June 13,” the narrators remind themselves, like an incantation, “eighty-three degrees out, under sunny skies.”

The boys—now men—end the book gathered in the tree house, the lost kingdom of their youth: “It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been,” they say, “or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.” The boys might as well be calling for themselves; no one will ever answer.

This text was drawn from the introduction to Picador’s new edition of “The Virgin Suicides,” by Jeffrey Eugenides .

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By Jeffrey Eugenides

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The Virgin Suicides Characters

By jeffrey eugenides, the virgin suicides character list.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by people who wish to remain anonymous

Cecilia Lisbon

Thirteen-year-old Cecilia is the youngest Lisbon sister. Her suicide attempt signals the tragedy of the Lisbon sisters. She is shy, known as the strange one by her sisters. She invokes the Virgin Mary and often wears an old wedding gown that is cut short. More information on her character is revealed in her detailed diary entries that are discovered after her death. She first attempts at suicide by slitting her wrists, which is unsuccessful. She finally kills herself by jumping out a window and impaling herself on the spiked fence.

The second youngest Lisbon sister. Lux is sly, beautiful and promiscuous and forms the major attraction of the neighbourhood boys. She is a secret smoker and is the most rebellious of all the sisters. She begins having sex with strange men on her roof after the girls are forbidden to leave the house. Lux loses her virginity to Trip Fontaine. Lux dies from carbon monoxide poisoning. 

Bonnie Lisbon

Fifteen-year-old Bonnie is the quiet, obedient and pious middle sister. She kills herself by hanging. 

Mary Lisbon

The second oldest sister. Mary is very concerned with her appearance and spends most of her time in front of a mirror. She is unsuccessful in her suicide pact but kills herself by ingesting sleeping pills a month after her sisters's deaths. 

Therese Lisbon

Seventeen-year-old Therese is the oldest sister. She is intellectual and spends her time reading science textbooks. She kills herself by ingesting gin and sleeping pills.     

Mrs. Lisbon

Mrs. Lisbon, the girls' mother, is domineering and forceful. She is incredibly pious and sets strict rules for her rules. Mrs. Lisbon locks the girls in the house and withdraws them from society after Lux breaks curfew.

Mr Lisbon is the girls' father and the math teacher at their high school. Though he loves his family, he is emasculated by his wife and daughters. 

Trip Fontaine

The best looking boy in high school. He has sex with Lux. 

The neighbourhood boys

The boys are the narrators of the text, dedicating themselves to the mystery of the Lisbon sisters. They are obsessed with the sisters (even when they are adults). 

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The Virgin Suicides Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Virgin Suicides is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for The Virgin Suicides

The Virgin Suicides study guide contains a biography of Jeffrey Eugenides, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Virgin Suicides
• The Virgin Suicides Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Virgin Suicides

The Virgin Suicides essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides.

• Pure Melancholy vs. False Happiness: Reading The Virgin Suicides
• Fighting Pressure from Both Sides: Gender and Feminism in The Virgin Suicides
• The Dying Who Refuse to Bury the Dead: The Virgin Suicides, the Limits of Consciousness, Death and Decay
• The Virgin Suicides and the Suburban Ideal: How the American Dream Became Obsolete

Wikipedia Entries for The Virgin Suicides

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Sofia Coppola and The Virgin Suicides cast reunite to talk 20th anniversary

Devan Coggan (rhymes with seven slogan) is a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly. Most of her personality is just John Mulaney quotes and Lord of the Rings references.

Sofia Coppola still has Trip Fontaine's wig. It's been 20 years since the writer-director made her dreamy, sun-drenched debut with The Virgin Suicides , adapted from Jeffrey Eugenides' novel about the five doomed Lisbon sisters. Not only did the 2000 film help launch Coppola's career, but it's since become a cultural touchstone, exploring teenage love and tragedy with an unprecedented introspection.

Two decades after the film's premiere, EW gathered Coppola and her cast for an Around the Table video chat, a family reunion of sorts uniting the five sisters — Lux ( Kirsten Dunst ), Mary (A.J. Cook), Therese (Leslie Hayman), Bonnie (Chelse Swain), and Cecilia (Hanna Hall) — as well as long-haired heartthrob Trip Fontaine ( Josh Hartnett ) for a look back at The Virgin Suicides ' legacy. All agreed that the film made a lasting impact on each of them, one that still lingers in their lives 20 years later — sometimes even literally, as in the case of Trip's wig.

"It's in my storage!" Coppola says.

"I forgot about what a pain in the ass the wig was," Hartnett adds with a laugh.

"It was probably not the best quality wig," Coppola admits. "But it worked."

Coppola — the daughter of directors Eleanor and Francis Ford Coppola — didn't originally plan to follow in her filmmaking family's footsteps, but when she learned that producers were planning to adapt Eugenides' best-selling novel in the late 1990s, she felt so protective over the story that she decided to try to write a script on her own.

"I loved that book, and I heard they were going to make a movie of it, and I hoped that they didn't mess it up — as that happens sometimes with books that you love," she recalls. "I just had an idea of how I thought they should make it into a movie, so I thought I would try to learn how to write a screenplay. I started working on one just as a kind of practice. I thought I would just do a few chapters."

But Coppola couldn't get the Lisbon sisters out of her head, and when she finished writing a full script, she approached the film's producers and asked if they'd consider making her version. The result was a low-budget shoot in Canada, with Toronto standing in for suburban '70s Michigan. Like Eugenides' novel, Coppola's Virgin Suicides explores the lives of the five sisters and their well-intentioned but oppressive parents (James Woods and Kathleen Turner), told through the eyes of the infatuated teenage boys in their neighborhood. But whereas Eugenides treated the Lisbons as unknowable enigmas, whose tragic endings are seen as mysteries to be unraveled, Coppola focused on the sisters' rich inner lives — cryptic and hidden, to be sure, but also devastatingly human.

To play the young blonde sisters, Coppola cast mostly unknowns. At that point, Dunst was the biggest star, having appeared in films like Interview With the Vampire , Little Women , and Jumanji .

"When I read the script, I was a little bit nervous because I was making out with all these guys in the script, and I just was overwhelmed and kind of a young 16-year-old," Dunst admits. "But when I met Sofia, I felt at ease, and I knew that this would be something special."

Once filming began, Coppola tried to imbue her set with a casual, summer camp vibe, and although the shoot was only a few weeks, the young cast hit it off immediately, celebrating birthdays and playing laser tag as a form of Lisbon family bonding. (Woods, they all agree, was the most competitive and took laser tag extremely seriously.)

"I think it helped that you guys were close to that age, and that everyone was close to that age," Coppola says. "That was a pet peeve for me: I never understood why growing up, the teenagers in movies looked [old]. Like in Grease , they're all like in their 30s. They never look like teenagers in our real life or at school. I didn't relate to them very often. I think there's such a huge difference between a 15-year-old and a 20-year-old, and because the story was really about that moment, I wanted to try and capture what that looks and feels like. So it just seems obvious that you'd have actors that are at the same age as the characters."

For the teen heartthrob Trip Fontaine, who pursues the "stone fox" Lux, Coppola cast a young Hartnett. "It was the most calm and inviting arena to do anything," the actor says. "It felt like nothing I'd done before." One of the ways Coppola put her young actors at ease was by playing the film's '70s-inspired soundtrack on set, like when Trip struts through the high school hallway to Heart's "Magic Man."

"I remember being in screenings early on [and] editing, like, Is the movie working?" Coppola remembers. "And as soon as Trip Fontaine makes his entrance, I'm like, okay, the audience is with it. It's going to be okay."

One of the scenes that required perhaps the most coordination was the kiss between Trip and Lux, after she bursts out of the Lisbon house and climbs inside his car. "The lights in the house would go off, and then I'd have to run out," Dunst recalls. "It was such a long-winded thing to get in the car, jump on Josh, his wig would fall off… Then I bit him once, I remember. It was just a mess."

The Virgin Suicides debuted to solid reviews at the Cannes Film Festival in 1999, with critics praising Coppola's hazy aesthetic and insightful look at teenage girlhood. But the film barely made a blip at the box office, and it wasn't until years later that the director and cast realized that it had continued to resonate.

"I think the dreamy aspect of it and the way that Sofia filmed it, it really struck a deep chord in people's psyches," Hall says. "When people who are our age and our generation talk about it, and when younger people talk about it, it's a very defining film for them."

And teenage girls weren't the only ones watching: Cook remembers that when she joined the cast of Criminal Minds in 2005, all her costar Matthew Gray Gubler wanted to talk about was her role as a member of the Lisbon family.

"He's obsessed with this movie, and he fangirled so hard over The Virgin Suicides ," she says with a laugh. "He was like, oh my gosh! Mary's joining our cast!"

Now, 20 years on, The Virgin Suicides has cemented its place as a teenage classic, getting a Criterion Collection release in 2018 and continuing to introduce new audiences to the tragedy of the Lisbons.

"The fact that it's been over 20 years is just mind-blowing," Cook says. " Virgin Suicides is that experience that I keep finding myself chasing, you know? It was this amazing experience that was so collective and such a learning experience for me."

"I think it was the beginning of me finding confidence as an adult," says Hartnett. "Everything's changed since then. It's been almost 22 years since we shot it. That's so many lifetimes; it's absolutely insane. It was a transformative experience for me, and I've always said if anyone cares to ask, it's probably my favorite filming experience."

"To be part of a movie that would be my favorite movie during that age…" Dunst adds. "You couldn't ask for more."

Watch the full Around the Table video above.

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75 Best Quotes About Traveling With Friends

Because your epic adventures together call for the perfect saying.

It’s no secret that traveling can open your eyes to new experiences, cultures and perspectives. What can make those memorable journeys even better? A companion, of course! Traveling with friends can enhance trips in unimaginable ways. For starters, they can be your personal photographer when selfies won’t suffice. That’s what friends are for, right ?

Exploring the world together can create enlightening experiences that you will look back on for years to come. But, before you embark on your next adventure, we’ve rounded up some of the best traveling with friends quotes to get you excited about the trips that you have yet to take.

From short and sweet to deep and meaningful, these quotes will boost your anticipation for your future travels. If you’ve taken trips together in the past, these travel quotes can help you reflect and reminisce. Text them in your special group chat or post as captions on Instagram . Regardless of how you share them, these quotes and messages are sure to resonate with your travel buddies.

No matter if you’re going with one friend or a group of your closest buds, traveling with friends presents an opportunity to strengthen bonds while having fun. So, pack your bags and get ready to create memories that will last a lifetime.

• “ Sharing adventures means enjoying them 100% more .” – Anonymous
• “ There are no strangers in this world, only friends I haven’t met yet. ” – William Butler Yeats
• “Friends make everything better, vacations included! ” — Anonymous
• “ A friend may be waiting behind a stranger’s face .” – Maya Angelou
• “ Traveling with a friend is like stepping into a storybook adventure together.” – Unknown
• “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “Travel far, travel wide, but always travel with a friend by your side. ” – Unknown
• “ Just as the stars shine brighter in the night sky, so do friendships glow stronger amidst the wonders of the world discovered together .” – Unknown
• “ As the road stretches out before us, I’m grateful for the company of my best friend, knowing that no matter where we end up, the journey together is what truly matters. ” – Unknown
• “ No matter where our journey takes us, friendship will always be our guiding light. ” —Anonymous
• “ I can speak to my soul only when the two of us are off exploring deserts or cities or mountains or roads. ” – Paulo Coelho
• “Good company on a journey makes the way seem shorter.” — Izaak Walton
• “A good friend listens to your adventures. A best friend makes them with you.” — Unknown
• “A journey is best measured in friends rather than miles.” — Tim Cahill
• “No adventure is complete without you by my side.” — Unknown
• “Friends that travel together, stay together.” — Unknown
• “It doesn’t matter where you’re going — it’s who you go with that makes it fun!” — Unknown
• “As soon as I saw you, I knew a grand adventure was about to happen.” — Winnie The Pooh.
• “Life was meant for great adventures and close friends." — Unknown
• “You can pack for every occasion, but a good friend will always be the best thing you could bring!” — Unknown
• "We all have that one friend who is either on a road-trip or planning a road-trip or thinking about a road-trip or talking to people who are on road-trip or posting quotes about road-trip." — Crestless Wave
• “It’s the friends we meet along the way that help us appreciate the journey.” — Unknown
• “You never know where life will take you, but it will always be better with friends.” —Unknown
• “We are all travelers in the wilderness of the world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
• “The tans will fade but the memories will last forever.” — Unknown
• “Wherever it is you may be, it is your friends who make your world.” — Chris Bradford
• ​​“When traveling life’s journey, it’s good to have a friend’s hand to hold on to.” — Unknown
• “If you want to go fast go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” — African Proverb
• “A good trip is an even better one with your bestie.” — Unknown
• “The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends” —Shirley MacLaine
• “Embarking on new adventures is a million times better with close pals.” — Unknown
• “Life was meant for great adventures and close friends.” —Unknown
• “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” —Mark Twain
• “Adventure awaits — all you need is your best buddy to make it a reality.” — Unknown

• “Life is a beach, enjoy the waves.” — Unknown
• “Frozen drinks are better with friends.” — Unknown
• “With friends by your side, every journey becomes an opportunity to discover the beauty of the world and the depths of your bond.” — Unknown
• “If you go looking for a friend, you’re going to find they’re very scarce. If you go out to be a friend, you’ll find them everywhere.” — Zig Ziglar
• “On the road, strangers become friends, sharing stories and laughter, creating bonds that last beyond the journey.” — Unknown
• “ The best way to travel is to always pack light, with the exception of a friend . ” —Anonymous
• " If you want to have fun, bring a friend.” — Unknown
• “ Nothing makes the journey more enjoyable than a friend who can make you laugh.” — Unknown
• “ I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within .” —Lillian Smith
• “ In the tapestry of life, friends are the threads that weave together our most cherished travel stories .” – Unknown
• “ May your travels be filled with the magic of friendship, the wonder of new experiences, and the warmth of shared memories that last a lifetime .” —Unknown
• " T raveling the world is great, but nothing tops going around the world with a friend ." —Unknown
• “ The beach and my besties are all I need to have a good time." —Unknown
• "Travel memories we make alone may fade, but those made with friends will last a lifetime." — Unknown
• “Away is a place where it’s not about the money you spend. It’s about the moments you share.” —Unknown
• “Just grab a friend and take a ride, together upon the open road.” —The Goofy Movie
• Life is about doing things that don’t suck with people who don’t suck.” —Unknown
• “I would like to travel the world with you twice. Once, to see the world. Twice, to see the way you see the world.” —Unknown
• “Everyone needs this friend that calls and says, “Get dressed, we’re going on an adventure.” —Unknown
• “Getting to know new people and gaining new friends is one of life’s greatest pleasures. So, conquer your fears and get out there.” —Tony Clark
• “Traveling with friends is always better.” —Unknown
• “No road is long with good company.” —Turkish proverb
• "Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born." —Anais Nin
• "In life, it’s not where you go – it’s who you travel with.” — Charles M. Schulz
• “Exploring new places is always sweeter with your favorite people.” — Unknown
• “Getting lost with you is a risk I’m always willing to take.”— Unknown
• “As with any journey, whom you travel with is more important than the destination.” —Unknown
• “At the end of the day, your feet should be dirty, your hair messy and your eyes sparkling.” —Shanti
• “May your adventures bring you closer together, even as they take you far away from home.” — Trenton Lee Stewart
• “I get a friend to travel with me… I need somebody to bring me back to who I am. It’s hard to be alone.” —Leonardo DiCaprio
• “Travel should make friendships stronger and memories sweeter.” —Unknown
• “Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.” —Ernest Hemingway
• “Sometimes all you need is a great friend and a tank of gas.” — Thelma & Louise
• “One of the great things about travel is that you find out how many good, kind people there are.” —Edith Wharton
• “We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.” — Paul Coelho
• “Sometimes all you need is a great friend and thirst for adventure.” —Unknown
• “Nothing makes a good trip more memorable than experiencing it with your best friends.” —Unknown
• “Traveling with a pal can be the foundation for a lifelong friendship.” —Unknown
• “Good times and crazy friends make the best memories.” —Unknown
• “The best things in life are the people we love, the places we’ve been, and the memories we’ve made along the way.” —Unknown
• “Don’t be dismayed at good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.”— Richard Bach

@media(max-width: 64rem){.css-o9j0dn:before{margin-bottom:0.5rem;margin-right:0.625rem;color:#ffffff;width:1.25rem;bottom:-0.2rem;height:1.25rem;content:'_';display:inline-block;position:relative;line-height:1;background-repeat:no-repeat;}.loaded .css-o9j0dn:before{background-image:url(/_assets/design-tokens/goodhousekeeping/static/images/Clover.5c7a1a0.svg);}}@media(min-width: 48rem){.loaded .css-o9j0dn:before{background-image:url(/_assets/design-tokens/goodhousekeeping/static/images/Clover.5c7a1a0.svg);}} 100+ Quotes For Any Occasion

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54 Travel Quotes That Will Inspire You To Pack Your Bags

From funny to inspirational, these quotes will fuel your wanderlust.

Short Travel Quotes

• Inspirational Travel Quotes
• Vacation Quotes
• Funny Travel Quotes

Whether you're an avid traveler or dreaming of your first big trip, these travel quotes reflect the spirit of travel, offering insights and motivations for your next journey from authors, poets, and philosophers.

Southern Living

• "Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow." — Anita Desai
• “To travel is to live.” – Hans Christian Andersen
• "Travel brings power and love back into your life." — Rumi Jalalud-Din
• “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” ― St. Augustine
• “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” ― Lao Tzu
• "I read; I travel; I become." ― Derek Walcott
• "Adventure is worthwhile." — Aesop
• "To travel is to evolve." — Pierre Bernardo
• "Not all those who wander are lost." — J.R.R. Tolkien
• "Travel far, travel often, and travel without regrets." — Oscar Wilde
• "An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered." — G.K. Chesterton
• "To travel is worth any cost or sacrifice." — Elizabeth Gilbert
• “Oh, the places you’ll go!” – Dr. Suess 
• “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” – Helen Keller
• “Live your life by a compass, not a clock.” – Erica Jong
• “Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.” ― Anita Desai

Inspirational Travel Quotes 

• "Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world." — Gustave Flaubert
• “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” ― David Mitchell
• "I am one of those who never knows the direction of my journey until I have almost arrived." — Anna Louise Strong
• "The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself." — Wallace Stevens
• "One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things." — Henry Miller
• "Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest." — Freya Stark
• "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not." — Ralph Waldo Emerson
• "This is what holidays, travels, vacations are about. It is not really rest or even leisure we chase. “We strain to renew our capacity to wonder, to shock ourselves into astonishment once again." — Shana Alexander
• "Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling." — Margaret Lee Runbeck
• "We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls." —Anaïs Nin
• “Do not follow where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust
• “With age, comes wisdom. With travel, comes understanding.” – Sandra Lake

Vacation Quotes 

• “No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one.” ― Elbert Hubbard
• “After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.” ― Kenneth Grahame 
• “When all else fails, take a vacation.” ― Betty Williams
• “In matters of healing the body or the mind, vacation is a true genius!” ― Mehmet Murat ildan
• “Here's to a vacation of no regrets!” ― Joan Rylen
• "I can lie around and relax at home. A vacation is a chance for doing.”― Tessa Bailey
• “Well, I think every day’s a vacation for me. When you really, really like what you’re working on, it’s like always being on vacation.” ― Andy Warhol
• “Reading is just a vacation you pay less for, with an agenda you have no control over.” ― J.S. Wik
• “What I needed in the moment was a family vacation.” ― Deena Kastor

Funny Travel Quotes 

• "Jet lag is for amateurs." — Dick Clark
• "I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them." — Mark Twain
• “Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the moon.” – Paul Brandt
• “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” – Paul Theroux
• “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck
• “There is nothing safer than flying—it’s crashing that is dangerous.” –Theo Cowan
• “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it is lethal.” –Paulo Coelho
• “Don’t live the same year 75 times and call it a life.” –Robin S. Sharma
• “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” –Susan Sontag
• “Boy, those French. They have a different word for everything.” –Steve Martin
• “Adventure, yeah. I guess that’s what you call it when everybody comes back alive.” –Mercedes Lackey
• “Don’t worry about the world ending today, it’s already tomorrow in Australia.” – Charles M. Schulz
• “Drink heavily with the locals whenever possible.” – Anthony Bourdain
• “The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.” – Russell Baker

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