Top 400 Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

103. “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

104. “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

105. “We’re all well-acquainted with depression, we all know what the low moods are, but the mania was not something I knew much about. I didn’t know that it would make someone dress extravagantly or start to pun, and to stay up and drink.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

106. “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

107. “By cutting off my hair I was punishing myself for loving someone so much. I was trying to be stronger.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

108. “She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

109. “To be inclusive you must accommodate different levels of sophistication.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

111. “Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

113. “I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of a shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

114. “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

115. “Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

116. “If you used your head, if you became aware of how love was culturally constructed and began to see your symptoms as purely mental, if you recognized that being “in love” was only an idea, then you could liberate yourself from its tyranny.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

118. “If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn’t hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn’t write about it.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

119. “I was aware that you weren’t supposed to write about suburbia, that it was undignified in some way, the subject matter not momentous enough. And so, for a long time, that kept me from writing about it. But once I began, I realized it was just as interesting as anywhere else.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

120. “That was the deal basically: catatonia without; frenzy within.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

121. “She wanted out of the decorating scheme.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

122. “The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

123. “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

124. “No matter how long your’ve been at it, you always start from scratch.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

125. “Pay no attention to the terrors that visit you in the night. The psyche is at its lowest ebb then, unable to defend itself. The desolation that envelops you feels like truth, but isn’t. It’s just mental fatigue masquerading as insight.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

126. “Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

127. “It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

128. “Luce even analyzed my prose style to see if I wrote in a linear, masculine way, or in a circular, feminine one.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

129. “Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable, and she thought when Dominic heard about it, on the highway, amid the cactus, he would realize that it was she who loved him.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

130. “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.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

131. “Pregnancy humbles husbands. After an initial rush of male pride they quickly recognise the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

132. “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

133. “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?”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

134. “He didn’t understand how she had bewitched him, nor why having done so she promptly forgot his existence, and in desperate moods he asked his mirror why the only girl he was crazy about was the only girl not crazy about him.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

135. “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

136. “I’d like to have a word for ‘the sadness inspired by failing restaurants’ as well as for ’the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

137. “I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

138. “You used to be able to tell a person’s nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

139. “The more she thought about it, the more Madeleine understood that extreme solitude didn’t just describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she’d always felt when she was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

140. “I think, especially when you’re in college, each book that you’re reading tends to tell you who you are.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

Featured in: Reading Quotes

141. “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

142. “When she smiled, her mouth showed too many teeth, but at night Trip Fontaine dreamed of being bitten by each one.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

143. “All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and one, who went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her collarbones collected water.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

144. “Some Pulitzer winners – novelists – have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn’t been my experience.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

145. “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

146. “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

147. “Pregnancy made her feel too much like an animal. It was embarrassing to be so publicly colonized.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

Featured in: Reading Quotes

149. “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

150. “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