Top 100 Eugenides Quotes
#1. She was the stone-faced queen, then and ever after. She had needed the mask to rule, and she had been glad to have it. She wondered if Eugenides was glad of his.
Megan Whalen Turner
#2. He wondered how the Attolians thought Eugenides had managed to become king if he was the idiot they assumed him to be. Perhaps because they had never seen him as the Thief, with his head thrown back and a glint in his eye that made the hair on the back of a man's neck rise up.
Megan Whalen Turner
#3. One cannot toss ambassadors back like bad fish," said Eugenides. "You treat them with care, or you'll find you've committed an act of war.
Megan Whalen Turner
#4. He lies to himself. If Eugenides talked in his sleep, he'd lie then, too.
Megan Whalen Turner
#5. There are a lot of things a person with two hands couldn't steal," Eddis said.
"So?"
"If it's impossible to steal them with two hands, it's no more impossible to steal them with one. Steal peace, Eugenides. Steal me some time.
Megan Whalen Turner
#6. 'Middlesex' by Jeffrey Eugenides left me both moved and, at times, laughing out loud in delight.
Kim Edwards
#7. I knew I would be in the story somewhere," Eugenides interjected.
"Oh no," said Phresine, "This was a humble servant."
"Ouch."
"Though very courageous."
"Not me," whispered Eugenides to his pillow.
Megan Whalen Turner
#8. It isn't deep," the Eddisian Ambassador said from the other side of the bed. He was leaning over the wound, looking critical and mildly disappointed. Eugenides didn't miss a beat.
"It is ... too ... deep!" he insisted, outraged.
Megan Whalen Turner
#9. The books I love most are the ones that combine some sort of gripping story with really beautiful or stylish writing. Some of my favorites are 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides, 'The Interpreter of Maladies' by Jhumpa Lahiri, and 'Blindness' by Jose Saramago.
Karen Thompson Walker
#10. Why did you come if not to murder my king?"
"I came to steal his magus."
"You can't," said the magus in question.
"I can steal anything," Eugenides corrected him, "even with one hand.
Megan Whalen Turner
#11. Ornon says, Ornon-who-always-has-something-to-say says, the Thieves of Eddis don't have breaking points. We have flash points instead, like gunpowder. That's what makes us dangerous. -Eugenides
Megan Whalen Turner
#12. If Attolia could look like a queen, Eugenides was like a god revealed, transformed into something wholly unfamiliar, surrounded by the cloth-of-gold bedcover like a deity on an altar, passionless and calculating.
Megan Whalen Turner
#13. Would you have your hand back, Eugenides? And lose Attolia? And see Attolia lost to the Mede?'
Eugenides's eyes were open. In front of his face the floor was littered with tiny bits of glass that glittered in the candlelight.
'You have your answer, Little Thief.
Megan Whalen Turner
#14. Today, she had yielded the sovereignty of her country to Eugenides, who had given up everything he had ever hoped for, to be her King.
Megan Whalen Turner
#15. On the bed, Eugenides stirred restlessly. "Upset at the sight of blood?" he said. "Not my wife, Ornon."
"Your blood," the ambassador pointed out.
Eugenides glanced at the hook on his arm and conceded the point. "Yes," he said. He seemed lost in memory. The room was quiet.
Megan Whalen Turner
#16. Upset at the sight of blood?" he said. "Not my wife, Ornon."
"Your blood, " the ambassador pointed out. Eugenides glanced at the hook in his arm and conceded the point. "Yes," he said.
Megan Whalen Turner
#17. Eschewing ceremony, Eugenides said, "You shot the ambassador?"
"You gave me the gun," protested Sounis.
"I didn't mean for you to shoot the ambassador with it!" Eugenides told him.
"Oh, how our carefully laid plans go astray," murmured the magus.
"You shut up!" said Gen, laughing.
Megan Whalen Turner
#18. Just asleep, Eddis reassured her.
At the sound of her voice Eugenides's head turned slightly, but he didn't wake. Attolia, seeing the movement, breathed again and pressed her hand to her chest where it hurt.
Megan Whalen Turner
#19. Attolia had brushed Eugenides's cheek almost shyly before sending him with a wave back to his own couch.
Megan Whalen Turner
#20. I didn't think about being king," he said, his voice hoarse.
Eddis stared. "Your capacity to land yourself in a mess because you didn't think first, Eugenides, will never cease to amaze me. What do you mean you didn't think about being king? Is Attolia going to marry you and move into my library?
Megan Whalen Turner
#21. She's like a prisoner inside stone walls, and every day the walls get a little thicker, the doorways a little narrower."
"And?" Eddis prompted.
"Well," said Eugenides, "it's a challenge.
Megan Whalen Turner
#22. This is the stupidest plan I have ever in my career participated in," Xenophon said.
"I love stupid plans," said Eugenides.
Megan Whalen Turner
#23. Only the Lisbon house remained dark, a tunnel, an emptiness, past our smoke and flames.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#24. The monster always approaches from the direction you least expect.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#25. 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
#26. During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#27. I went to church. It didn't help. In those days that was the best place to meet a girlfriend. In church! All of us praying to be different.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#28. After the Second World War, San Francisco was the main point of re-entry for sailors returning from the Pacific. Out at sea, many of these sailors had picked up amatory habits that were frowned upon back on dry land. So these sailors stayed in San Francisco ...
Jeffrey Eugenides
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#33. Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been my experience.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#34. I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#35. We thought green was cheerful, but not too cheerful. Green was also serious.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#36. A line from Barthes she remembered: Every lover is mad, we are told. But can we imagine a madman in love?
Jeffrey Eugenides
#37. Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#38. 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
#39. I climbed the stairs and got back into bed, pulling a pillow over my face to block out the summer light. But there was no hiding from reality that morning.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#40. I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#41. Dr. Philbosian smelled like an old couch, of hair oil and spilled soup, of unscheduled naps.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#42. Our fellow Negro citizens could be summed up in something Tessie said after watching Sidney Poitier's performance in To Sir with Love, which opened a month before the riots. She said, You see, they can speak perfectly normal if they want.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#43. 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
#44. Grief is natural,' she said. 'Overcoming it is a matter of choice.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#45. Lux spent the ride dialing the radio for her favorite song. "It makes me crazy," she said. "You know they're playing it somewhere, but you have to find it.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#47. She had just started living like a grown-up and she'd never felt more vulnerable, frightened or confused in her life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. The humming of my parents' voices from behind my bedroom wall, which throughout my childhood had filled me with a sense of security, had now become a source of anxiety and panic.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#51. It might not even be that great to marry your ideal. Probably, once you attained your ideal, you got bored and wanted another.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#52. Luce even analyzed my prose style to see if I wrote in a linear, masculine way, or in a circular, feminine one.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#53. 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
#54. Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#55. I thought that being king meant I didn't have to kill people myself. I see know that was another misconception.
Megan Whalen Turner
#56. I have a lot of novels that I haven't finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it's not going anywhere. I don't publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#57. She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#58. How do you write about something, even something real and painful-like suicide-when all of the writing that's been done on that subject has robbed you of any originality of expression?
Jeffrey Eugenides
#59. Once you've visited the underworld, you never forget the way back.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#60. Who was the Thief that she would love him? A youth, just a boy with hardly a beard and no sense at all ... A liar, she thought, an enemy, a threat. He was brave, a voice inside her said, he was loyal ... A fool, she answered back. A fool and a dead one. She ached with emptiness.
Megan Whalen Turner
#61. We're all well-acquainted with depression, we all know what the low moods are, but the mania was not something I knew much about. I didn't know that it would make someone dress extravagantly or start to pun, and to stay up and drink.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#62. I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#63. They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived - bound, in other words, for life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#64. No matter how long your've been at it, you always start from scratch.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#65. A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#67. Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking its passage for some reason.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#68. Great discoveries, whether of silk or gravity, are always windfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#69. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#70. ... hearts wrung with anguish, the anguish of having children, a vulnerability as astonishing as the capacity for love that parenthood brings.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#71. I am not sure I trust you."
"You can trust me with your life, My King."
"But not with my wine, obviously. Give it back.
Megan Whalen Turner
#73. I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#75. Mitchell had answered that, as far as he understood them, mystical experiences were significant only to the extent that they changed a person's conception of reality, and if that changed conception led to a change in behavior and action, a loss of ego.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#76. But as I peeked at my brother's inert body ... I was aware only of what a strange thing it was to be male. Society discriminated against women, no question. But what about the discrimination of being sent war? Which sex was really thought to be expendable.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#77. It isn't an easy thing to give your loyalty to someone you don't know, especially when that person chooses to reveal nothing of himself.
Megan Whalen Turner
#78. Detroit's a great music town. If your interaction with it was mainly musical, I'm sure you have a good opinion of the place.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#79. Now I've given up any hope of lasting fame or literary perfection. I don't care if I write a great book anymore, but just one which, whatever its flaws, will leave a record of my impossible life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#80. Desdemona, mourning her parents, was still imprisoned by the past. And so she stood on the mountain, looking down at the emancipated city, and felt cheated by her ability to feel happy by everybody else.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#81. My mother pictured a daughter as a counterinsurgent: a fellow lover of lapdogs, a seconder of proposals to attend the Ice Capades. In
Jeffrey Eugenides
#82. I know that if you don't look for an alternative, Sophos, you certainly won't find one.
Megan Whalen Turner
#83. He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#84. Aloft, he looked frail, diseased, and temperamental, as we expected a European to look.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#85. It was a recession when I graduated, but I was so unequipped to have a job anyway, I don't think it would have mattered if the economy was booming. I think I was expecting bad jobs. But as it went on through my 20s, I began to wonder how things were going to turn out.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#86. 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
#87. They lined you up in kindergarten, alphabetically. On fourth-grade field trips you took your partner's hand to push past the musk ox or the steam turbine. School was a perpetual lineup, ending in this final one.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#88. I would handle the deep intellectual matters, like vibrators; she would handle the social sphere.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#89. I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#90. That since Cecilia's suicide, the Lisbons could hardly wait for night to forget themselves in sleep.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#91. Even the air seemed on fire, subtly aflame with energy as it does when you are young, when the synapses are firing wildly and death is far away.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#92. There's a scabbard for every dagger,' the madam says in Turkish as the whores laugh.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#93. She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#94. 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
#95. I don't approve of women driving, mind you. And now they get to vote!" He grumbled to himself. "Remember that play we saw ("The Minotaur")? All women are like that. Given a chance, they'd all fornicate with a bull.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#97. It was painful, but sometimes you must have these painful moments where you tear yourself away from something that isn't working.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#98. Because we watched her so closely out of the corners of our eyes, everything she did made too much noise, her cigarette smoke got into everything, she drank too much wine at dinner.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#99. The pains they took to make themselves smooth! The rashes the creams left! The futility of it all! The enemy, hair, was invincible. It was life itself.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#100. She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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