Jeffrey Eugenides - Life Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

View all Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes
What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets." (...) "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.

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

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
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