Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

102 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

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

Jeffrey Eugenides
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
Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.

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
I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

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

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

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
You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight of her made you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you knew who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences. That was the hope.

Jeffrey Eugenides
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
Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope

Jeffrey Eugenides
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
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
Though at this moment she felt abused, abandoned, and ashamed of herself, Madeleine knew that she was still young, that she had her whole life ahead of her—a life in which, if she persevered, she might do something special—and that part of persevering meant getting past moments just like this one, when people made you feel small, unlovable, and took away your confidence.

Jeffrey Eugenides
The window was still open. Mr Lisbon said. I don't think we'd ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close it or else she'd go on jumping out of it forever

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