Top 400 Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 9

201. “From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn’t waste their time with them. 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. The only trust fund I have is this story, and unlike a prudent Wasp, I’m dipping into principal, spending it all.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

202. “All of a sudden America wasn’t about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

203. “I’m hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

204. “That’s the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

205. “Up until recently, Milton thought of Tessie as his prim cousin. Whenever one of his friends expressed interest in her, Milton told them to give up the idea. “That’s honey from the icebox,” he said, As Artie Shaw might have. “Cold sweets don’t spread.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

206. “She was a large, disordered woman, like a child’s drawing that didn’t stay within the lines.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

207. “I want an ending that’s satisfying. I’m more of a classical writer than a modernist one in that I want the ending to be coherent and feel like an ending. I don’t like when it just seems to putter out. I mean, life is chaotic enough.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

208. “I went to church. It didn’t help. In those days that was the best place to meet a girlfriend. In church! All of us praying to be different.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

209. “But most often she watched the candles as if their outcome held her own, the flames almost extinguishing themselves, but, by some greed of oxygen, persisting.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

210. “When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

211. “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

212. “I wanted to be an actor. My parents were not too keen on that.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

213. “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

214. “The zipper opened all the way down our spines.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

215. “Within the substandard construction of the Charlevoix church, literally upon a shaky foundation, I was baptized into the Orthodox faith; a faith that had existed long before Protestantism had anything to protest and before Catholicism called itself catholic; a faith that stretched back to the beginnings of Christianity, when it was Greek and not Latin, and which, without an Aquinas to reify it, had remained shrouded in the smoke of tradition and mystery whence it began.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

216. “Some people need a picture. Any great religion has to be inclusive. And to be inclusive you have to accommodate different levels of sophistication.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

217. “Scars crossed her welded wrists.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

218. “You can tell when something’s not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don’t go away.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

219. “I do not think the patient truly meant to end her life. Her act was a cry for help.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

220. “Tessie allowed Milton to press his clarinet to her skin and fill her body with music. At first it only tickled her. But after a while the notes spread deeper into her body. She felt the vibrations penetrate her muscles, pulsing in waves, until they rattled her bones and made her inner organs hum.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

221. “It seemed like we were supposed to feel sorry for everything that ever happened, ever.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

222. “The ideas for my books come about in two ways. There can be an intellectual idea that seems to be the reason for writing the book. The other motive is unconscious. There is something deeply psychological and emotional that draws me to the material in the first place.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

223. “I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

224. “Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

225. “The magisterial presence of all those potentially readable words stopped her in her tracks.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

226. “I always work in a room where there’s no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

227. “On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

228. “Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

229. “They lined you up in kindergarten, alphabetically. On fourth-grade field trips you took your partner’s hand to push past the musk ox or the steam turbine. School was a perpetual lineup, ending in this final one.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

230. “She was the still point in the turning world.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

231. “There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

232. “When I’m creating a character, it’s a little bit like what my theater teachers used to tell me about Stanislavsky, like if you’re using sense memory to do a scene – if you have to cry in a scene, you try to remember something in your life that made you cry and you use that in order to get the tears.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

233. “Even the air seemed on fire, subtly aflame with energy as it does when you are young, when the synapses are firing wildly and death is far away.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

234. “Planning is for the world’s great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

235. “Here it comes, I thought. The first ex-boyfriend had been summoned. Soon the rest would follow. They would file around the table, presenting their deficiencies, telling of their addictions, their cheating hearts... But that didn’t happen with Julie. This was because Julie isn’t husband-hunting. So she didn’t have to interview me for the job.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

236. “Next to it were five potted photographs of the Lisbon girls, pinned with rusty tacks. We didn’t remember putting them up, but there they were, dim from time and weather so that all we could make out were phosphorescent outlines of the girls’ bodies, each a different glowing letter of an unknown alphabet.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

237. “Detroit’s a great music town. If your interaction with it was mainly musical, I’m sure you have a good opinion of the place.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

238. “It occurred to us that she and the girls read secret signs of misery in cloud formations, that despite the discrepancies in their ages something timeless communicated itself between them, as though she were advising the girls in her mumbling Greek, “Don’t waste your time on life.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

239. “Where else would she feel more comfortable than in this subterranean realm where people wrote down what they couldn’t say, where they gave voice to their most shameful longings and knowledge?”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

240. “I had a briefcase at one point, but it was a kind of 1980s New Wave briefcase. It was made of some kind of cardboard and it had metal hinges. It was kind of faux industrial looking, and I used to carry my books in it rather than a backpack. I didn’t want to have normal student accoutrements.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

241. “Whatever happened now would become the truth, that whatever he seemed to be would become what he was – already an American, in other words.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

242. “This is my country,′ Lefty said, and to prove it, he did a very American thing: he reached under the counter and produced a pistol.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

243. “What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn’t like?”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

244. “Then one Sunday morning, before winter break, Abby’s boyfriend, Whitney, materialized at their kitchen table, reading something called “Of Grammatology”. When Madeleine asked what the book was about, she was given to understand by Whitney that the idea of a book being “about” something was exactly what this book was against, and that, if it was “about” anything, then it was about the need to stop thinking of books as being about things.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

245. “It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

246. “It was as if her own heart had been surgically removed from her body and was being kept at a remote location, still connected to her and pumping blood through her veins, but exposed to dangers she couldn’t see: her heart in a box somewhere, in the open air, unprotected.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

247. “But I care about the reader, and I’m trying to keep the reader’s attention for as long as I can.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

248. “College wasn’t like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

249. “He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

250. “His lost look of a man who realized that all this dying was going to be the only life he ever had.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides