Top 100 Eugenides's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Attolia had brushed Eugenides's cheek almost shyly before sending him with a wave back to his own couch.
Megan Whalen Turner
#3. 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
#4. When you travel like I did, vague about destination and with an open-ended itinerary, a holy-seeming openness takes over your character. It's the reason the first philosophers were peripatetic.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#5. The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#6. 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
#7. But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#8. 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
#9. The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#10. It's then I smell smoke. "You even smoke while you brush your teeth?"
She looks at me sideways. "Menthol", she says.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#11. Parents are supposed to pass down physical traits to their children, but it's my belief that all sorts of other things get passed down, too: motifs, scenarios, even fates.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#12. Sourmelina's secret (as Aunt Zo put it): 'Lina was one of those women they named the island after.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#13. 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
#14. Don't you think it would have been easier just to stay the way you were?" I lifted my face and looked into my mother's eyes. And I told her: "This is the way I was." You
Jeffrey Eugenides
#15. Lefty and Desdemona's cousin, Sourmelina, had gone to America and was living now in a place called Detroit. Built
Jeffrey Eugenides
#16. 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
#17. Semiotic was the form Zipperstein's midlife crisis had taken... Instead of buying sports car, he'd bought deconstrution.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#18. He knew a lot about his grandparents - and perhaps he feels he's been endowed with abilities to go into people's heads who are long dead - but, to a certain extent, he's making it up.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#19. I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#20. Aunt Zo, who never missed a chance to lament her marriage, had said at dinner in her comedienne's voice, My husband. Always the bridesmaid and never the bride.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. I want an ending that's satisfying. I'm more of a classical writer than a modernist one in that I want the ending to be coherent and feel like an ending. I don't like when it just seems to putter out. I mean, life is chaotic enough.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#24. The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#25. 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
#26. No friend had I made there, but I wasn't with this group to make friends, and besides, he sneered too much. I've found that people who sneer are almost always sneering at me.
Megan Whalen Turner
#27. You used to be able to tell a person's nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. At the same time, it's a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to give a sense that Cal, in writing his story, is perhaps inventing his past as much as recalling it.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#31. I think there's a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to do with the method acting that I was taught in high school and college.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#32. So Sophos thinks you're going to marry me."
"While I think you'll marry Sophos."
"I might. We'll see what he's like when he grows up.
Megan Whalen Turner
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. Olive trees are intimate creatures, eloquent in their twistedness. It's easy to understand why the ancients believed human spirits could be trapped inside them.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#37. That's how people live, by telling stories. What's the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? "Tell me a story." That's how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#38. Everyone in the room was so spectral-looking that Madeleine's natural healthiness seemed suspect, like a vote for Reagan.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#39. I saw the movie," he said. "I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so" - he leaned toward us - "their tits bleed.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#41. Virgin suicide
What was that she cried?
No use in stayin'
On this holocaust ride
She gave me her cherry
She's my virgin suicide
Jeffrey Eugenides
#43. In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#44. That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#45. There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#46. Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#47. Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#48. The lover's discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn't physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, the most solitary of places.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#49. Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities. Jimmy Zizmo, crouching over the Packard's wheel has already changed past understanding.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#50. Being a writer is a solitary life. So the little part of me that's an actor still enjoys the theatrical part of reading and doing the voices and telling the story.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Grief is natural,' she said. 'Overcoming it is a matter of choice.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Dr. Philbosian smelled like an old couch, of hair oil and spilled soup, of unscheduled naps.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#58. I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. A line from Barthes she remembered: Every lover is mad, we are told. But can we imagine a madman in love?
Jeffrey Eugenides
#63. We thought green was cheerful, but not too cheerful. Green was also serious.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#64. 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
#67. You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. The monster always approaches from the direction you least expect.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#76. Only the Lisbon house remained dark, a tunnel, an emptiness, past our smoke and flames.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#77. 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
#78. You can tell when something's not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don't go away.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Anyone who can steal the king's seal ring can manage the locks on his record room.
Megan Whalen Turner
#82. It was always embarrassing when professors assigned their own books. Even Madeleine, who found all the reading hard going, could tell that Zipperstein's contribution to the field was reformulative and second-tier.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#83. I want you to steal something."
I smiled. "Do you want the king's seal? I can get it for you."
"If I were you," said the magus, "I'd stop bragging about that." His voice grated.
My smile grew. The gold ring with the engraved ruby had been in his safekeeping when I had stolen it away.
Megan Whalen Turner
#84. A girl's not a watermelon you plug a hole in to see if it's sweet.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#85. I should also mention, with the vestigial pang of a once flat-chested girl, Desdemona's voluptuous figure.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#86. She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#87. There's a scabbard for every dagger,' the madam says in Turkish as the whores laugh.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#88. That since Cecilia's suicide, the Lisbons could hardly wait for night to forget themselves in sleep.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. She had just started living like a grown-up and she'd never felt more vulnerable, frightened or confused in her life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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