Top 400 Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I’m constantly having doubts and moments of depression and then excitement and then back into the slough of despond.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

106. “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

107. “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

108. “Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

109. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

112. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— 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. “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

117. “I don’t know what you’re feeling. I won’t even pretend.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

119. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

122. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

133. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

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

— 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. “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

145. “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

146. “I never know what I feel until it’s too late.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

147. “To start with, look at all the books.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

148. “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

149. “It was morning by the clock but deepest nighttime in his body.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

150. “There is a small window of opportunity for freckled girls to tan.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides