Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

102 Sourced Quotes

Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.

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

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

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

Jeffrey Eugenides
Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he'd learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents' fighting: his laziness, his overachieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism.

Jeffrey Eugenides
She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she d remember the brutal fact that had caused it.

Jeffrey Eugenides
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
She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.

Jeffrey Eugenides
My house fly theory is related to my theory about why time seems to go faster as you get older." "Why's that?" the girl asked. "It's proportional," Leonard explained. "When you're five, you've only been alive a couple thousand days. But by the time you're fifty, you've lived around twenty thousand days. So a day when you're five seems longer because it's a greater percentage of the whole.

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

Jeffrey Eugenides
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.

Jeffrey Eugenides
The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.

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

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

Jeffrey Eugenides
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
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
It was morning by the clock but deepest nighttime in his body.

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
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.

Jeffrey Eugenides
It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.

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
Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.

Jeffrey Eugenides
I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.

Jeffrey Eugenides
They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.

Jeffrey Eugenides
College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.

Jeffrey Eugenides