Top 400 Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

52. “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

53. “But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

54. “The lover’s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn’t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, the most solitary of places.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

55. “Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

56. “I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

57. “You don’t understand me. I’m a teenager. I’ve got problems!”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

58. “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

59. “They said nothing and our parents said nothing, so we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn’t give a damn about lawns.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

60. “A sniper is cowardly, sneaky; he kills from a distance, unseen.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

61. “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

62. “I’d like to show how ‘intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members’ connects with ’the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

63. “Every letter was a love letter.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

64. “There was nowhere I could go that wouldn’t be you.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

65. “Somebody out of touch with reality, when she jumped she probably thought she’d fly.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

66. “Normality wasn’t normal. It couldn’t be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

67. “Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking it’s passage for some reason.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

68. “The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn’t hit us the way it does.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

69. “My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

70. “We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. 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

71. “But then she came closer and we saw the light in her eyes we have been looking for ever since.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

72. “The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It’s a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

73. “It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

74. “They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

75. “Though some of us saw Lux as a force of nature, impervious to chill, an ice goddess generated by the season itself, the majority knew she was only a girl in danger, or in pursuit, of catching her death of cold.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

76. “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

77. “She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

78. “Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

79. “And so a strange new possibility is arising. Compromised, indefinite, sketchy, but not entirely obliterated: free will is making a comeback. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

80. “You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

81. “The time has to be right and the heart willing.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

82. “I’m not sure, with a grandmother like mine, if you can ever become a true American in the sense of believing that life is about the pursuit of happiness.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

83. “I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sku was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn’t be you.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

84. “Find the Bad Guy means how, when you’re arguing with your spouse, both people are trying to win the argument. Who didn’t close the garage door? Who left the Bigfoot hair clump in the shower drain? What you have to realize, as a couple, is that there is no bad guy. You can’t win an argument when you’re married. Because if you win, your spouse loses, and resents losing, and then you lose, too, pretty much.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

85. “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

86. “Being a writer is a solitary life. So the little part of me that’s an actor still enjoys the theatrical part of reading and doing the voices and telling the story.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

87. “Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

88. “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

89. “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

90. “That’s how people live, by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? “Tell me a story.” That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

91. “Her tragedy hadn’t made her more approachable, and in fact lent her the unknowable quality of a person who had suffered more than could be expressed.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

92. “He was like a statue being chiseled away from the inside, hollowed out. As more and more of his thoughts gave him pain, Milton had increasingly avoided them. Instead he concentrated on the few that made him feel better, the bromides about everything working out. Milton, quite simply, had ceased to think things through.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

93. “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

94. “The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it’s a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

95. “When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full posession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims – these are lucky eventualities but they aren’t love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

96. “I’m constantly having doubts and moments of depression and then excitement and then back into the slough of despond.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

97. “The sonogram didn’t exist at the time; the spoon was the next best thing.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

98. “It is wonderful barefoot in New York. It is like walking on one big giant tomb!”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

99. “They had killed themselves over the failure to find a love that none of us could ever be.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

100. “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