Top 100 Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes
#1. Only the Lisbon house remained dark, a tunnel, an emptiness, past our smoke and flames.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#2. Here's a question I still can't answer: Did I see through the male tricks because I was destined to scheme that way myself? Or do girls see through the tricks, too, and just pretend not to notice?
Jeffrey Eugenides
#3. During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#4. What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#5. I was engrossed with the book, I was having difficulties with it, and I just didn't notice the years were going by.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#6. I had a briefcase at one point, but it was a kind of 1980s New Wave briefcase. It was made of some kind of cardboard and it had metal hinges. It was kind of faux industrial looking, and I used to carry my books in it rather than a backpack. I didn't want to have normal student accoutrements.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#7. Dr. Philbosian smelled like an old couch, of hair oil and spilled soup, of unscheduled naps.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#8. I'm aware of cliches and I'm aware of experiments that have been done and I'm aware of a kind of deadness to a lot of realism both in the language and in the structure of a book.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#9. Grief is natural,' she said. 'Overcoming it is a matter of choice.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#10. She had just started living like a grown-up and she'd never felt more vulnerable, frightened or confused in her life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#11. We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#12. My goal in life is to become an adjective," Leonard said. "People would go around saying, 'That was so Bankheadian.' Or, 'A little too Bankheadian for my taste.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#13. Luce even analyzed my prose style to see if I wrote in a linear, masculine way, or in a circular, feminine one.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#14. If you want to have a career, my advice is don't get married. You think things have changed and there's some kind of gender equality now, that men are different, but I've got news for you. They're not.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#15. They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived - bound, in other words, for life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#17. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#18. I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#19. The most widely raised type of silkworm, the larva of the 'Bombyx mori', no longer exists anywhere in a natural state. As my encyclopedia poignantly puts it: 'The legs of the larvae have degenerated, and the adults no longer fly'.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#20. At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#22. In between calls, she lay on her side, thinking about calling.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#23. His point, again and again, was that truth wasn't the property of any one faith and that, if you looked closely, you found a ground where they all converged.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#24. I should also mention, with the vestigial pang of a once flat-chested girl, Desdemona's voluptuous figure.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#25. The sky grew darker, and the light abandoned the daytime, so that we found ourselves always moving in a timeless murk, the only way to discern the hour the taste of sour burps, toothpaste in the morning, redolent in the afternoon of the jellied beef of school cafetetria meals
Jeffrey Eugenides
#26. In the Orthodox Church, we don't go for partial immersion; no sprinkling, no forehead dabbing for us. In order to be reborn, you have to be buried first, so under the water I went.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#27. A girl's not a watermelon you plug a hole in to see if it's sweet.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#28. Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#29. If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#30. Tessie allowed Milton to press his clarinet to her skin and fill her body with music. At first it only tickled her. But after a while the notes spread deeper into her body. She felt the vibrations penetrate her muscles, pulsing in waves, until they rattled her bones and made her inner organs hum.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#31. There is a small window of opportunity for freckled girls to tan.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#32. In the midst of my skeptical, cynical, often pessimistic nature exists a slender capacity to believe, if only temporarily, in a guiding, unseen power, and whenever this happens, I go with it. That's what inspiration is. You don't get it from the gods. You make it.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#33. Phyllida's hair was where her power resided. It was expensively set into a smooth dome, like a band shell for the presentation of that long-running act, her face.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#34. The ideas for my books come about in two ways. There can be an intellectual idea that seems to be the reason for writing the book. The other motive is unconscious. There is something deeply psychological and emotional that draws me to the material in the first place.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#36. I know that attaching memories to books may be going out of the world, but while it lasts, it's a strong record of your life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#37. I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#38. At the time, infatuated with Nietzsche (and half asleep), Leonard didn't want to get into this argument, the truth of which wasn't that all religions were equally valid but that they were equally nonsensical.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#39. The Lisbon girls were thirteen (Cecelia), and fourteen (Lux), and fifteen (Bonnie), and sixteen (Mary), and seventeen (Therese).
Jeffrey Eugenides
#40. Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#42. If this story is written only for myself, then so be it. But it doesn't feel that way. I feel you out there, reader. This is the only kind of intimacy I'm comfortable with. Just the two of us, here in the dark.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#43. It is wonderful barefoot in New York. It is like walking on one big giant tomb!
Jeffrey Eugenides
#44. The only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream everyone has together.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#45. Between addiction and depression? Depression a lot worse. Depression ain't something you just get OFF of. You can't get CLEAN from depression. Depression be like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your MIND. You just got to be careful not to touch where it hurts. It always be there, though.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#46. That was when I realized a shocking thing. I couldn't become a man without becoming The Man. Even if I didn't want to.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#47. We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it - that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#48. Even our parents seemed to 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
#49. And you can feel it in the air, they way the air has somehow been keeping score.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#51. It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, Stay there. Don't move.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#52. The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#53. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#54. And all goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / and to die is different from that anyone supposed, and luckier.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#55. A sniper is cowardly, sneaky; he kills from a distance, unseen.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#56. Thinking back, we decided the girls had been trying to talk to us all along, to elicit our help, but we had been to infatuated to see it.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#57. It had to do with Leonard. With how she felt about him and how she couldn't tell anyone. With how much she liked him and how little she knew about him. With how desperately she wanted to see him and how hard it was to do so.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#59. Or in my grandparents's case, the circling worked like this: as they paced around the deck the first time, Lefty and Desdemona were still brother and sister. The second time, the were bride and bridegroom. And the third, they were husband and wife.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#60. But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#61. 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
#62. Given the choice, a yeast cell's ideal state is to be diploid. But if it's in an environment with a lack of nutrients, you know what happens?
The diploids break into haploids again. Solitary little haploids. Because, in a crisis, it's easier to survive as a single cell.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#63. She leaned toward him and said in a quiet voice, "Are you Christian?"
Mitchell hesitated to answer. The worst thing about religion was religious people.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#64. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#66. It was as if, before she'd met him, her blood had circulated grayly around her body, and now ir was all oxygenated and red. She was petrified of becoming the half-alive person she'd been before.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#67. But it rained all the time, fog covered the fields, and by then he was reading Tolstoy. There were some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things. A Confession was a book like that.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#69. Pregnancy humbles husbands. After an initial rush of male pride they quickly recognise the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#70. The two of them, father and son, lived like roommates, stumbling upon each other in their matching peacock robes, bitching over who used up the coffee, but by afternoon they drifted in the pool together, bumping the sides, compatriots in the search for a little passion on earth. They
Jeffrey Eugenides
#71. Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#72. We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#73. Though auditing a class at the Sorbonne taught by Luce Irigaray and titled The Mother-Daughter Relationship: The Darkest of Dark Continents, Claire had followed maternal example by setting out guest towels.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#74. Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#75. When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls' emotional state at that point, he said, Buffeted but not broken.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#78. They thought depression was like bieng 'depressed'. They thought it was like being in a bad mood, only worse. Therefore, they tried to get him to snap out of it.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#79. This is my country,' Lefty said, and to prove it, he did a very American thing: he reached under the counter and produced a pistol.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#80. If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#81. O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;
Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching Earth;
Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth
With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.
She hath no questions, she hath no replies.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#82. Though the weather was cool, the beach at Herringsdorf was dotted with quite a few diehard nudists. Primarily men, they lay walrus-like on towels or boosterously congregated.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#83. On the floors above Delivery, in flowerless rooms, women lay recovering from hysterectomies and mastectomies. Teenage girls with burst ovarian cysts nodded out on morphine. It was all around me from the beginning, the weight of female suffering, with its biblical justification and vanishing acts.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#85. This was a characteroloical prelude, but it wasn't chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#86. Let me tell you something. Do you know why those Turkish girls cover their faces? You think it's because of religion? No. It's because otherwise no one can stand to look at them!
Jeffrey Eugenides
#88. The trees like lungs filling with air
My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair
Jeffrey Eugenides
#90. One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#91. What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn't like?
Jeffrey Eugenides
#93. In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#94. Speramus meliora; resurgret cineribus. We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes,
Jeffrey Eugenides
#95. She didn't want to be liberated from her emotions, but to have their importance confirmed.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#96. After all the screaming in our house, there reigned, that winter on Middlesex, only silence. A silence so profound that, like the left foot of the President's secretary, it erased portions of the official record.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#98. Two things mania did were to keep you up all night and to enable nonstop sex: pretty much the definition of college.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#99. When I'm creating a character, it's a little bit like what my theater teachers used to tell me about Stanislavsky, like if you're using sense memory to do a scene - if you have to cry in a scene, you try to remember something in your life that made you cry and you use that in order to get the tears.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#100. There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
