Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

102 Sourced Quotes

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

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

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

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

Jeffrey Eugenides
Sourmelina's secret (as Aunt Zo put it): 'Lina was one of those women they named the island after.

Jeffrey Eugenides
The more she thought about it, the more Madeleine understood that extreme solitude didn't just describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she'd always felt when she was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it.

Jeffrey Eugenides
There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said that the original human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That's why everybody's always searching for their other half. Except for us. We've got both halves already.

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

Jeffrey Eugenides
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
If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.

Jeffrey Eugenides
The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.

Jeffrey Eugenides
They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us.

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

Jeffrey Eugenides
Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Girls forbidden to dance would only attract husbands with bad complexions and sunken chests.

Jeffrey Eugenides
-Who are you, anyway? -Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.

Jeffrey Eugenides
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
Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.

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

Jeffrey Eugenides
Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

Jeffrey Eugenides
It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.

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

Jeffrey Eugenides
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
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
There is a small window of opportunity for freckled girls to tan.

Jeffrey Eugenides
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.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

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

Jeffrey Eugenides