Jeffrey Eugenides quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

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.

Eating is natural. Gaining weight is your choice.

But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.

There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

It was painful, but sometimes you must have these painful moments where you tear yourself away from something that isn't working.

My mother pictured a daughter as a counterinsurgent: a fellow lover of lapdogs, a seconder of proposals to attend the Ice Capades. In

She wanted out of that decorating scheme.

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.

I was engrossed with the book, I was having difficulties with it, and I just didn't notice the years were going by.

I never know what I feel until it's too late.

Whatever happened now would become the truth, that whatever he seemed to be would become what he was - already an American, in other words.

In Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was no less than a guerrilla uprising.
The Second American Revolution.

He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.

Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.

The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.

Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.

It's then I smell smoke. "You even smoke while you brush your teeth?"
She looks at me sideways. "Menthol", she says.

She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself.

Aloft, he looked frail, diseased, and temperamental, as we expected a European to look.

Plate, nor did Mrs. Bates, who had once wept when we set

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.

We thought green was cheerful, but not too cheerful. Green was also serious.

No matter how long your've been at it, you always start from scratch.

Only the Lisbon house remained dark, a tunnel, an emptiness, past our smoke and flames.

There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich.

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

This was a characteroloical prelude, but it wasn't chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.

The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season.

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.

You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.

When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.

it's amazing what you can get used to.

His lost look of a man who realized that all this dying was going to be the only life he ever had.

It seemed like we were supposed to feel sorry for everything that ever happened, ever.

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.

I did what any loving, loyal daughter would have done who had been raised on a diet of Hercules movies.

Little by little he'd change; he'd get older; everything he felt now would fade into memory and then into nothing.

I would handle the deep intellectual matters, like vibrators; she would handle the social sphere.

It is said: San Francisco is where young people go to retire.

She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.

Lefty and Desdemona's cousin, Sourmelina, had gone to America and was living now in a place called Detroit. Built

Semiotic was the form Zipperstein's midlife crisis had taken... Instead of buying sports car, he'd bought deconstrution.

pulled out a blue bandanna,

Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.

Every second is eternal

My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.

I think it is important to remind people of the extent of our free will.

We were reckless with the implications

The monster always approaches from the direction you least expect.

Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.

He had the wit of a store mannequin.

Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities. Jimmy Zizmo, crouching over the Packard's wheel has already changed past understanding.

Dr. Philbosian smelled like an old couch, of hair oil and spilled soup, of unscheduled naps.

Biosynthesis and peripheral action of testosterone,

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

Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.

There's a time to talk and a time for silence.

When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls' emotional state at that point, he said, Buffeted but not broken.

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in ...

A line from Barthes she remembered: Every lover is mad, we are told. But can we imagine a madman in love?

It might not even be that great to marry your ideal. Probably, once you attained your ideal, you got bored and wanted another.

Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.

And you can feel it in the air, they way the air has somehow been keeping score.

By cutting off my hair I was punishing myself for loving someone so much. I was trying to be stronger.

There's a scabbard for every dagger,' the madam says in Turkish as the whores laugh.

This can't be true but I remember it.

And she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world.

A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.

One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.

We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.

You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.

And the magisterial presence of all those words stopped her in her tracks.

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly

We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.

She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.

This whole country's stolen.

A few years ago in Chicago, I rented an office, and I went there every day. For the most part I do work at home in an ugly room.

I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.

Buffeted but not broken.

Her head appears to be on fire but that is only a trick of the light. It was June 13, eighty-three degrees out, under sunny skies.

The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage.

And left no doubt that Cecilia had done violence to herself.

That was the deal basically: catatonia without; frenzy within

I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

The trees like lungs filling with air
My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair

It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.

Gathered in the folding chairs of the meeting room, they made a diverse group with the drug-addicted, a perfect democracy of collapse.

People don't save other people. People save themselves.

Real life doesn't live up to writing about it

A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.

The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.

You're a stone fox," he said, and took off.

Their desire was silent yet magnificent, like a thousand daisies attuning their faces toward the path of the sun.

It is wonderful barefoot in New York. It is like walking on one big giant tomb!

It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.

I do not think the patient truly meant to end her life. Her act was a cry for help.

Fiction should be specific rather than general, because people are specific.

Every novelist should possess a hermaphroditic imagination.