Top 400 Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Don’t waste your time on life.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

2. “Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

3. “Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

4. “Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she’d fly.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

5. “All wisdom ends in paradox.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

6. “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

7. “Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It’s always there, though.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

8. “In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

9. “Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

10. “Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It’s the thing that lets us say goodbye.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

11. “We’re all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

12. “She’d become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

13. “Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness”, “joy”, or “regret”. Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

14. “Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

15. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

16. “I think it is important to remind people of the extent of our free will.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

17. “There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

18. “You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn’t bother you so much.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

19. “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

20. “It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

21. “People don’t save other people. People save themselves.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

22. “The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

23. “Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

24. “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

25. “A girl’s not a watermelon you plug a hole in to see if it’s sweet.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

26. “At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

28. “Every novelist should possess a hermaphroditic imagination.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

29. “If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

30. “It is said: San Francisco is where young people go to retire.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

31. “The Statue of Liberty’s gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

32. “Avea cate un citat pentru fiecare lucru care i se intampla si in felul acesta evada din viata reala.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

33. “He was filled with embarrassment: embarrassment for the human race, its preoccupation with money, it love of swindle.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

34. “The trees like lungs filling with air My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

35. “She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you’d seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

36. “In the end, it wasn’t death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

37. “They’re just memories now. Time to write them off.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

38. “She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

39. “But in the end it wasn’t up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we’re born.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

40. “Parents are supposed to pass down physical traits to their children, but it’s my belief that all sorts of other things get passed down, too: motifs, scenarios, even fates.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

41. “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

42. “It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

43. “When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

44. “The worst thing about religion was religious people.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

45. “Their desire was silent yet magnificent, like a thousand daisies attuning their faces toward the path of the sun.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

46. “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

47. “At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn’t know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with, and he reached out in order to meet her for the first time.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

48. “She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

49. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

50. “Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides