Eugenides Quotes

As one does the return of sun after winter, I stood still and accepted the warm glow of possibility, of feeling right in the company of this small, oddly fierce person, with the inky hair and the lovely, unemphasized body. ~ 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

The most widely raised type of silkworm, the larva of the 'Bombyx mori', no longer exists anywhere in a natural state. As my encyclopedia poignantly puts it: 'The legs of the larvae have degenerated, and the adults no longer fly'. ~ 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

She didn't want to be liberated from her emotions, but to have their importance confirmed. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

It's a kind of fugue state, anyway, early sex. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

I did what any loving, loyal daughter would have done who had been raised on a diet of Hercules movies. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

My mother pictured a daughter as a counterinsurgent: a fellow lover of lapdogs, a seconder of proposals to attend the Ice Capades. In ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Martinis in a can, Callie. We live in an age of wonders. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

We thought green was cheerful, but not too cheerful. Green was also serious. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

He left in a state of distraction and a winter coat. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Well, marriage doesn't function in the way it used to in terms of deciding our fate, but it's in our heads, and it determines a lot of our actions. Like, right now, if you think about gay marriage - and they just started having the first gay marriages in New York - it shows what a potent idea marriage remains for people. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Why did you come if not to murder my king?"
"I came to steal his magus."
"You can't," said the magus in question.
"I can steal anything," Eugenides corrected him, "even with one hand. ~ Megan Whalen Turner

The room was full of people. "Ninety-eight days," said the queen, folding her hands in her lap. "You said it would take six months." Eugenides picked at a nub in the coverlet. "I like to give myself a margin. When I can." "I didn't believe you," the queen admitted with a delicate smile. "Now you know better." The king smiled back. They might as well have been alone. The queen turned her head to listen. There was shouting in the guardroom. Costis tensed. His hand went to his belt, looking for his sword. "That will be Dite," said the king. "He must have been in the outer rooms. I may as well see him." The queen rose and stepped behind the embroidered screen in front of the fireplace. Her attendants withdrew. The king's attendants remained, digesting the fact that their helpless, inept king had promised his wife to destroy the house of Erondites in six months and had done it in ninety-eight days. ~ Megan Whalen Turner

The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

The worst part was that, as the years passed, these memories became, in the way you kept them in a secret box in your head, taking them out every so often to turn them over and over, something like dear possessions. They were the key to your unhappiness. They were the evidence that life wasn't fair. If you weren't a lucky child, you didn't know you weren't lucky until you got older. And then it was all you ever thought about. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

The ideas for my books come about in two ways. There can be an intellectual idea that seems to be the reason for writing the book. The other motive is unconscious. There is something deeply psychological and emotional that draws me to the material in the first place. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Usually my ideas are small. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Lux's frequent forged excuses from phys. ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t's and b's of her mother's signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L's reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

In the midst of my skeptical, cynical, often pessimistic nature exists a slender capacity to believe, if only temporarily, in a guiding, unseen power, and whenever this happens, I go with it. That's what inspiration is. You don't get it from the gods. You make it. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

For the first time ever we sympathized with the President because we saw how wildly our sphere of influence was misrepresented by those in no position to know what was going on. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

I am living through days as happy as those God keeps for his chosen people; and whatever becomes of me, I can never say that I have not tasted the purest joys of life. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar. The only trust fund I have is this story, and unlike a prudent Wasp, I'm dipping into principal, spending it all. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

within the frosted bushes. It was only in ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Even our parents seemed to agree more and more with the television version of things, listening to the reporters' inanities as though they could tell us the truth about our own lives. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

I remember the first time we took off our clothes in front of each other. It was like unwinding bandages. I was as much of a man as Olivia could bear at that point. I was her starter kit. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

On the floors above Delivery, in flowerless rooms, women lay recovering from hysterectomies and mastectomies. Teenage girls with burst ovarian cysts nodded out on morphine. It was all around me from the beginning, the weight of female suffering, with its biblical justification and vanishing acts. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Gathered in the folding chairs of the meeting room, they made a diverse group with the drug-addicted, a perfect democracy of collapse. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Lilies, I rule, heads, you do," he [the King] said, and threw the coin into the air.
"Lilies, you rule, heads, you throw again," said Attolia.
The coin dropped. Eugenides looked at it and then showed it to her. "No need," he said. The coin sat in his palm, obverse, showing the lilies of Attolia. He flipped it again and again and again. Each time it landed showing the lilies.
...
(Relius)
He wanted to dismiss the coin toss as slight of hand. Any circus performer could control the drop of a coin, but he'd been puzzled. The queen had been undismayed; she had seemed almost vindicated in her manner. It had been the King who was more disturbed with each toss of the coin. He'd looked almost sick, Relius thought, by the time he put the coin away.
...
Walking away along the arcade that lay perpendicular to the one where Relius lurked, the king pulled the coin from his pocket. He looked at the gold stater in sudden disgust and pitched it hard between the columns of the arcade into the shrubbery. ~ Megan Whalen Turner

But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

And the magisterial presence of all those words stopped her in her tracks. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Stomach-sleepers like me were in retreat from reality, given to dark perception and the meditative arts. This ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

This can't be true but I remember it. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

We had rarely seen our fathers in work boots before, toiling in the earth and wielding brand-new root clippers. They struggled with the fence, bent over like Marines hoisting the flag on Iwo Jima. It was the greatest show of common effort we could remember in our neighborhood, all those lawyers, doctors, and mortgage bankers locked arm in arm in the trench, with our mothers bringing out orange Kool-Aid, and for a moment our century was noble again. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

As much as he hated his lithium, here it was his friend. Leonard could feel the huge tide of sadness waiting to rush over him. But there was an invisible barrier keeping the full reality of it from touching him. It was like squeezing a baggie full of water and feeling all the properties of the liquid without getting wet. ~ 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 can tell when something's not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don't go away. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

From the beginning I was aware that there was something improper about the way I felt about Clementine Stark, something I shouldn't tell my mother, but I wouldn't have been able to articulate it. I didn't connect this feeling to sex. I didn't know sex existed ~ 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

All wisdom ends in paradox. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Semiotic was the form Zipperstein`s midlife crisis had taken... Instead of buying sports car, he'd bought deconstrution. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

What made Madeleine sit up in bed was something closer to the reason she read books in the first place and had always loved them. Here was a sign that she wasn't alone. Here was an articulation of what she had been so far mutely feeling. In bed on a Friday night, wearing sweatpants, her hair tied back, her glasses smudged, and eating peanut butter from the jar, Madeleine was in a state of extreme solitude. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Whereas my grandfather was getting used to a much more terrifying reality. Holding my hand to keep his balance, as trees and bushes made strange, sliding movements in his peripheral vision, Lefty was confronting the possibility that consciousness was a biological accident. Though he'd never been religious, he realized now that he'd always believed in the soul, in a force of personality that survived death. But as his mind continued to waver, to short-circuit, he finally arrived at the cold-eyed conclusion, so at odds with his youthful cheerfulness, that the brain was just an organ like any other and that when it failed he would be no more. ~ 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

There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

I know that attaching memories to books may be going out of the world, but while it lasts, it's a strong record of your life. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

It was still years before Desdemona, cutting cucumbers, would lean against the corner of the kitchen table and, without realizing it, would lean in a little harder, and after that would find herself taking up that position every day, the table corner snug between her legs. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Dr. Philbosian smelled like an old couch, of hair oil and spilled soup, of unscheduled naps. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Pregnancy made her feel too much like an animal. It was embarrassing to be so publicly colonized. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

There's a scabbard for every dagger,' the madam says in Turkish as the whores laugh. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

For our own part, we learned a great deal about the techniques of love, and because we didn't know the words to denote what we saw, we had to make up our own. That was why we spoke of "yodeling in the canyon" and "tying the tube," of "groaning in the pit," "slipping the turtle's head," and "chewing the stinkweed." Years later, when we lost our own virginities, we resorted in our panic to pantomiming Lux's gyrations on the roof so long ago; and even now, if we were to be honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that it is always that pale wraith we make love to, always her feet snagged in the gutter, always her single blooming hand steadying itself against the chimney, no matter what our present lovers' feet and hands are doing. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

He felt as if he were being violently emptied out, as if a big magnet were pulling his blood and fluids down into the earth. He was weeping again, unstoppably, his head like the chandelier in his grandparents' house in Buffalo, the one that was too high for them to reach and that every time he visited had one fewer bulb alight. His head was an old chandelier, going dark. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Though auditing a class at the Sorbonne taught by Luce Irigaray and titled The Mother-Daughter Relationship: The Darkest of Dark Continents, Claire had followed maternal example by setting out guest towels. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Early June, Providence, Rhode Island, the sun up for almost two hours already, lighting up the pale bay and the smokestacks of the Narragansett Electric factory, rising like the sun on the Brown University seal emblazoned on all the pennants and banners draped up over campus, a sun with a sagacious face, representing knowledge. But this sun
the one over Providence
was doing the metaphorical sun one better, because the founders of the university, in their Baptist pessimism, had chosen to depict the light of knowledge enshrouded by clouds, indicating that ignorance had not yet been dispelled from the human realm, whereas the actual sun was just now fighting its way through cloud cover, sending down splintered beams of light and giving hope to the squadrons of parents, who'd been soaked and frozen all weekend, that the unseasonable weather might not ruin the day's activities. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Her father was about to have a heart attack, and my memories of her are now tinged with a blue wash of misfortune that hadn't quite befallen her at the time. She was standing bare-legged in the jungly weeds that grew up between our houses. Her skin was already beginning to react to the grass cuttings stuck to the ball, whose sogginess was suddenly explained by the overweight Labrador who now limped into view. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

They're just memories now," Chase Buell said sadly. "Time to write them off. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

My family suffered. My hair turned up in every corner, every drawer, every meal. Even in the rice puddings Tessie made, covering each little bowl with wax paper before putting it away in the fridge
even into these prophylactically secure desserts my hair found its way! Jet black hairs wound themselves around bars of soap. They lay pressed like flower stems between the pages of books. They turned up in eyeglass cases, birthday cards, once
I swear
inside an egg Tessie had just cracked. The next-door neighbor's cat coughed up a hairball one day and the hair was not the cat's. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn't like? ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

We all received invitations, made by hand from construction paper, with balloons containing our names in Magic Marker. Our amazement at being formally invited to a house we had only visited in our bathroom fantasies was so great that we had to compare one another's invitations before we believed it. It was thrilling to know that the Lisbon girls knew our names, that their delicate vocal cords had pronounced their syllables, and that they meant something in their lives. They had had to labor over proper spellings and to check our addresses in the phone book or by the metal numbers nailed to the trees. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

You don't understand me. I'm a teenager. I've got problems! ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

He wondered how the Attolians thought Eugenides had managed to become king if he was the idiot they assumed him to be. Perhaps because they had never seen him as the Thief, with his head thrown back and a glint in his eye that made the hair on the back of a man's neck rise up. ~ Megan Whalen Turner

Fiction should be specific rather than general, because people are specific. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a 13-yr-old girl. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Here's a question I still can't answer: Did I see through the male tricks because I was destined to scheme that way myself? Or do girls see through the tricks, too, and just pretend not to notice? ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Every letter was a love letter. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

She reached out and touched the king's face, cupping his cheek in her hand.
"Just a nightmare," he said, his voice still rough.
The queen's voice was cool. "How embarrassing," she said, looking at his maimed arm.
The king looked up then, and followed her gaze. If it was embarrassing to wake like a child screaming from a nightmare, how much more embarrassing to be the reason your husband woke screaming. A quick smile visited the king's face. "Ouch," he said, referring to more than the pain in his side. "Ouch," he said again as the queen gathered him into her arms. ~ Megan Whalen Turner

The zipper opened all the way down our spines. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

I went to church. It didn't help. In those days that was the best place to meet a girlfriend. In church! All of us praying to be different. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

I think it is important to remind people of the extent of our free will. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

College feminists made fun of skyscrapers, saying they were phallic symbols. They said the same thing about space rockets, even though, if you stopped to think about it, rockets were shaped the way they were not because of phallocentrism but because of aerodynamics. Would a vagina-shaped Apollo 11 have made it to the moon? Evolution had created the penis. It was a useful structure for getting certain things done. And if it worked for the pistils of flowers as well as the inseminatory organs of Homo sapiens, whose fault was that but Biology's? But no
anything large or grand in design, any long novel, big sculpture, or towering building, became, in the opinion of the "women" Mitchell knew at college, manifestations of male insecurity about the size of their penises. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Shit. What have kids got to be worried about now? If they want trouble, they should go live in Bangladesh. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Lefty and Desdemona's cousin, Sourmelina, had gone to America and was living now in a place called Detroit. Built ~ 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

[Eugenides] looked from Eddis to the window, where the visible sky was already dark. He looked back, his gaze a little sharper, and said, "You forgot me."
Eddis shoved her hands into the pockets of her trousers..
"Don't lie," Eugenides said, pressing her. "You charged off in a haze of glory to chase the vile Mede from our shore, and you never gave me a thought until they were gone."
He twisted to address Attolia. "You forgot me, too," he accused.
Attolia answered cooly, "You were fed. ~ Megan Whalen Turner

The Lisbon girls were thirteen (Cecelia), and fourteen (Lux), and fifteen (Bonnie), and sixteen (Mary), and seventeen (Therese). ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

There was nowhere to go that wouldn't be me. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

They didn't exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen. Even in sensible school shoes, she shuffled as though barefoot, and the baggy apparel Mrs. Lisbon bought for her only increased her appeal, as though after undressing she had put on whatever was handy. In corduroys her thighs rubbed together, buzzing, and there was always at least one untidy marvel to unravel him: an untucked shirttail, a sock with a hole, a ripped seam showing underarm hair. She carted her books from class to class but never opened them. Her pens and pencils were as temporary as Cinderella's broom. When she smiled, her mouth showed too many teeth, but at night Trip Fontaine dreamed of being bitten by each one. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

It had to do with Leonard. With how she felt about him and how she couldn't tell anyone. With how much she liked him and how little she knew about him. With how desperately she wanted to see him and how hard it was to do so. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

People don't save other people. People save themselves. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

The time has to be right and the heart willing. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Our fellow Negro citizens could be summed up in something Tessie said after watching Sidney Poitier's performance in To Sir with Love, which opened a month before the riots. She said, You see, they can speak perfectly normal if they want. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

A sniper is cowardly, sneaky; he kills from a distance, unseen. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

It was as if her own heart had been surgically removed from her body and was being kept at a remote location, still connected to her and pumping blood through her veins, but exposed to dangers she couldn't see: her heart in a box somewhere, in the open air, unprotected. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Two things mania did were to keep you up all night and to enable nonstop sex: pretty much the definition of college. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

It was as if, before she`d met him, her blood had circulated grayly around her body, and now ir was all oxygenated and red. She was petrified of becoming the half-alive person she`d been before. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

The two of them, father and son, lived like roommates, stumbling upon each other in their matching peacock robes, bitching over who used up the coffee, but by afternoon they drifted in the pool together, bumping the sides, compatriots in the search for a little passion on earth. They ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

She was the stone-faced queen, then and ever after. She had needed the mask to rule, and she had been glad to have it. She wondered if Eugenides was glad of his. ~ Megan Whalen Turner

Given the choice, a yeast cell's ideal state is to be diploid. But if it's in an environment with a lack of nutrients, you know what happens?
The diploids break into haploids again. Solitary little haploids. Because, in a crisis, it's easier to survive as a single cell. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

That manic depression, far from being a liability was an advantage. It was a selected trait. If it wasn't selected for, then the "disorder" would have disappeared long ago, bred out of the population like anything else that didn't increase the odds of survival. The advantage was obvious. The advantage was the energy, the creativity, the feeling of genius, almost, that Leonard felt right now. There was no telling how many great historical figures had been manic-depressives, how many scientific and artistic breakthroughs had occurred to people during manic episodes. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides