Top 400 Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “She wanted a book to take her places she couldn’t get to herself.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

153. “One of the reasons that art is important to me is sometimes it actually feels more coherent than life. It orders the chaos.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

154. “It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the Giulia blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

155. “Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

156. “Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities. Jimmy Zizmo, crouching over the Packard’s wheel has already changed past understanding.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

157. “I’d never seen a creature with so many freckles before. A Big Bang had occurred, originating at the bridge of her nose, and the force of this explosion had sent galaxies of freckles hurtling and drifting to every end of her curved, warm-blooded universe.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

158. “Real life doesn’t live up to writing about it.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

160. “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

161. “This was a characteroloical prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

162. “From my birth when they went undetected, to my baptism where they upstaged the priest, to my troubled adolescence when they didn’t do much of anything and then did everything at once, my genitals have been the most significant thing that ever happened to me.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

163. “But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

164. “This can’t be true but I remember it.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

165. “Just when she’d got her head on straight, her body started falling apart.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

168. “She didn’t want to be liberated from her emotions, but to have their importance confirmed.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

169. “Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, ‘Middlesex.’”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

170. “Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

171. “Now I’ve given up any hope of lasting fame or literary perfection. I don’t care if I write a great book anymore, but just one which, whatever its flaws, will leave a record of my impossible life.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

172. “If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

173. “Out past the weekly glimpsed windows, out past the street, lived the world, which had, Old Mrs. Karafilis knew, been dying for years.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

174. “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

175. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

176. “Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

177. “I was young, and, despite dread, full of animal spirits; it was impossible for me to take a dark view too long.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

178. “I have a lot of novels that I haven’t finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it’s not going anywhere. I don’t publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

179. “Still point of the turning world.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

180. “A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

181. “Though the weather was cool, the beach at Herringsdorf was dotted with quite a few diehard nudists. Primarily men, they lay walrus-like on towels or boosterously congregated.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

182. “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

183. “I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I’m writing about women, I think I’m writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

184. “Mitchell had answered that, as far as he understood them, mystical experiences were significant only to the extent that they changed a person’s conception of reality, and if that changed conception led to a change in behavior and action, a loss of ego.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

185. “It was convenient to call them snipers, because if they weren’t snipers, then what were they? The governor didn’t say it; the newspapers didn’t say it; the history books still do not say it, but I, who watched the entire thing on my bike, saw it clearly: in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was nothing less than a guerrilla uprising. The Second American Revolution.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

186. “That was when I realized a shocking thing. I couldn’t become a man without becoming The Man. Even if I didn’t want to.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

187. “There’s a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I’m writing a character where I put myself in their place.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

188. “I was unemployable when I got out of college.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

189. “Figures. They let you in for free. Then you gotta pay for the rest of your life.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

190. “He wanted women to love him, all women, beginning with his mother and going on from there. Therefore, whenever any woman got mad at him, he felt maternal disapproval crashing down upon his shoulders, as if he’d been a naughty boy.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

191. “If they were going to kill you, would they knock?”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

192. “The matter with us is you.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

193. “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? It’s impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

194. “I remember liking to write stories pretty early on. In fourth or fifth grade, they would give us the beginning of a story, and we were supposed to finish it. I remember liking that. But I didn’t think about deciding to become a writer until high school at about the age of 16.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

195. “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

196. “We listened to them, but it was clear they’d received too much therapy to know the truth.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

197. “If you grew up in a house where you weren’t loved, you didn’t know there was an alternative.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

198. “I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some 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.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

199. “We just want to live. If anyone would let us.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

200. “Usually my ideas are small.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides