Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

102 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Jeffrey Eugenides
The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.

Jeffrey Eugenides
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
It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

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
The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.

Jeffrey Eugenides
The only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream everyone has together.

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

Jeffrey Eugenides
Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.

Jeffrey Eugenides