Top 100 Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes
#1. 'Middlesex' by Jeffrey Eugenides left me both moved and, at times, laughing out loud in delight.
Kim Edwards
#2. 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
#3. Only the Lisbon house remained dark, a tunnel, an emptiness, past our smoke and flames.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#4. The monster always approaches from the direction you least expect.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#5. 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
#6. During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. We thought green was cheerful, but not too cheerful. Green was also serious.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#16. A line from Barthes she remembered: Every lover is mad, we are told. But can we imagine a madman in love?
Jeffrey Eugenides
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#21. Dr. Philbosian smelled like an old couch, of hair oil and spilled soup, of unscheduled naps.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Grief is natural,' she said. 'Overcoming it is a matter of choice.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#25. 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
#27. She had just started living like a grown-up and she'd never felt more vulnerable, frightened or confused in her life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Luce even analyzed my prose style to see if I wrote in a linear, masculine way, or in a circular, feminine one.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Once you've visited the underworld, you never forget the way back.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived - bound, in other words, for life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#42. No matter how long your've been at it, you always start from scratch.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#43. A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#45. 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
#46. Great discoveries, whether of silk or gravity, are always windfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#47. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#48. ... hearts wrung with anguish, the anguish of having children, a vulnerability as astonishing as the capacity for love that parenthood brings.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#50. I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#59. Aloft, he looked frail, diseased, and temperamental, as we expected a European to look.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. I would handle the deep intellectual matters, like vibrators; she would handle the social sphere.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#64. 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
#65. That since Cecilia's suicide, the Lisbons could hardly wait for night to forget themselves in sleep.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#66. 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
#67. There's a scabbard for every dagger,' the madam says in Turkish as the whores laugh.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#68. She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#69. 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
#70. 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
#72. It was painful, but sometimes you must have these painful moments where you tear yourself away from something that isn't working.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#77. The last thing the hockey ball symbolized was Time itself, the unstoppability of it, the way we're chained to our bodies, which are chained to Time.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#78. I remember the first time we took off our clothes in front of each other. It was like unwinding bandages. I was as much of a man as Olivia could bear at that point. I was her starter kit.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#79. All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!
Jeffrey Eugenides
#80. In between calls, she lay on her side, thinking about calling.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#81. And for a time the tree stood blighted, trying to raise its stumted arms, a creature clubbed mute, only its sudden voicelessness making us realize it had been speaking all along.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#82. 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
#83. That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#84. Out past the weekly glimpsed windows, out past the street, lived the world, which had, Old Mrs. Karafilis knew, been dying for years.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#85. Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#86. In Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was no less than a guerrilla uprising.
The Second American Revolution.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#87. I should also mention, with the vestigial pang of a once flat-chested girl, Desdemona's voluptuous figure.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#88. 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
#89. I did what any loving, loyal daughter would have done who had been raised on a diet of Hercules movies.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#90. But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#91. 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
#94. Tessie and I lay in our chairs, listening to wax being violently removed. 'Oh my!' cried the large lady. 'Is nothing,' belittled Helga. 'I do it perfect.' 'Oweee!' yelped a bikini-liner. And Helga, taking an oddly femenist stance: 'See what you do for the mens? You suffer. Is not worth it.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#95. What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, 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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#97. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#98. A girl's not a watermelon you plug a hole in to see if it's sweet.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#99. He wanted women to love him, all women, beginning with his mother and going on from there. Therefore, whenever any woman got mad at him, he felt maternal disapproval crashing down upon his shoulders, as if he'd been a naughty boy.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#100. And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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