"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."

"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."

"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."

"Almost every day, and even when she wasn't keeping an eye on Cecilia, Lux would suntan wearing a swimsuit that caused the knife sharpener to give her a 15-minute demonstration for free."

"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."

"No one could understand how Mrs. Lisbon and Mr. Lisbon, our math teacher, could produce such beautiful creatures."

"We knew that they knew everything about us, and that we couldn't fathom them at all."

"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."

"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."

"Palazzolo jumped off the roof over that rich bitch Porter. How stupid can you be?"

"[voiceover, reading from her diary] The trees, like lungs, filling with air. My sister - the mean one - pulling my hair."

"[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"

"Do you like to wrestle?"

"Hanna R. Hall - Cecilia Lisbon"

"A.J. Cook - Mary Lisbon"

"Josh Hartnett - Trip Fontaine"

"Kirsten Dunst - Lux Lisbon"

"Kathleen Turner - Mrs. Lisbon"

"James Woods - Mr. Lisbon"

"Beautiful, mysterious, haunting, invariably fatal. Just like life."

"Love Sex Passion Fear Obsession"

"Trip Fontaine: You're a stone fox."

"When she jumped, she probably thought she could fly."

"What we have here is a dreamer. Someone completely out of touch with reality."

"I haven't lived... I've died a few times."

"Shari Summers – Edith Phern"

"Judy Engles – Candy Gulf"

"Charles Tyner – General Victor Ball"

"G. Wood – Psychiatrist"

"Eric Christmas – Priest"

"Ellen Geer – Sunshine Doré"

"Cyril Cusack – Glaucus"

"Vivian Pickles – Mrs. Chasen"

"Dreyfus once wrote from Devil's Island that he would see the most glorious birds. Many years later in Brittany, he realized they had only been sea gulls... For me, they will always be... glorious birds."

"Bud Cort – Harold Parker Chasen"

"Ruth Gordon – Dame Marjorie "Maude" Chardin"

"I would be remiss in my duty, if I did not tell you, that the idea of...... intercourse... and the fact of your firm, young... body..... commingling, with the... withered flesh... sagging... breasts... and flabby b-... buttocks... makes me want... to vomit."

"Well, what do you say, Harold? Ah, it's a great life. There's action, adventure, advising, and you'll get a chance to see the war first-hand. And there are plenty of slant-eyed girls. I'll make a man out of you, Harold. You'll travel the world, put on a uniform, and take on a man's job. You'll walk tall, with a glint in your eye and a spring in your step, and the knowledge in your heart that you are working for peace and are serving your country, just like Nathan Hale. Now, that's what this country needs - more Nathan Hales. [He salutes a picture of Nathan Hale] And, Harold, I think I can see a little Nathan Hale in you."

"Tom Skerritt – as Motorcycle Officer"