Top 400 Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

253. “Her father was about to have a heart attack, and my memories of her are now tinged with a blue wash of misfortune that hadn’t quite befallen her at the time. She was standing bare-legged in the jungly weeds that grew up between our houses. Her skin was already beginning to react to the grass cuttings stuck to the ball, whose sogginess was suddenly explained by the overweight Labrador who now limped into view.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

254. “I think there’s a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to do with the method acting that I was taught in high school and college.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

255. “What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

256. “The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents’ lives.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

257. “There were pencil scrawls and ink stains, dried blood, snack crumbs; and the leather binding itself was secured to the lectern by a chain. Here was a book that contained the collected knowledge of the past while giving evidence of present social conditions... The dictionary contained every word in the English language but the chain knew only a few. It knew thief and steal and, maybe, purloined. The chain spoke of poverty and mistrust and inequality and decadence.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

258. “Stomach-sleepers like me were in retreat from reality, given to dark perception and the meditative arts. This.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

259. “One’s country is like oneself. The more you learned about it, the more there was to be ashamed of.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

260. “Everyone in the room was so spectral-looking that Madeleine’s natural healthiness seemed suspect, like a vote for Reagan.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

261. “Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

262. “But maybe they understood more about life than I did. 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.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

263. “But by the time Madeleine reached the age that Alwyn had been then, she realized that her sister’s iconoclasm and liberationist commitments had just been part of a trend. Alwyn had done the things she had done and voiced the political opinions she’d voiced because all her friends were acting and talking the same way.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

264. “The experience of watching Leonard get better was like reading certain difficult books. It was like plowing through late James, or the pages about agrarian reform in Anna Karenina, until you suddenly got to a good part again, which kept on getting better and better until you were so enthralled that you were almost grateful for the previous dull stretch because it increased your eventual pleasure.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

265. “He knew a lot about his grandparents – and perhaps he feels he’s been endowed with abilities to go into people’s heads who are long dead – but, to a certain extent, he’s making it up.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

266. “I spend most of every day writing. I like to write every day if I can. I don’t start extremely early.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

267. “That was the ideal: to remain dutiful to a preservationist ethos while not depriving yourself of modern creature comforts.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

268. “We had rarely seen our fathers in work boots before, toiling in the earth and wielding brand-new root clippers. They struggled with the fence, bent over like Marines hoisting the flag on Iwo Jima. It was the greatest show of common effort we could remember in our neighborhood, all those lawyers, doctors, and mortgage bankers locked arm in arm in the trench, with our mothers bringing out orange Kool-Aid, and for a moment our century was noble again.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

269. “Psychologists agree that adolescence is much more fraught with pressures and complexities than in years past. Often, in today’s world, the extended childhood American life has bestowed on its young turns out to be a wasteland, where the adolescent feels cut off from both childhood and adulthood. Self-expression can often be frustrated. More and more, doctors say, this frustration can lead to acts of violence whose reality the adolescent cannot separate from the intended drama.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

270. “Thinking back, we decided the girls had been trying to talk to us all along, to elicit our help, but we’d been too infatuated to listen. Our surveillance had been so focused we missed nothing but a simple returned gaze. Who else did they have to turn to? Not their parents. Nor the neighborhood. Inside their house they were prisoners; outside, lepers. And so they hid from the world, waiting for someone – for us – to save them.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

271. “There was something enjoyable about wandering around the city alone, feeling forlorn.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

272. “Her suicide, from this perspective, was seen as a kind of disease infecting those close at hand. In the bathtub, cooking in the broth of her own blood, Cecilia had released an aiborne virus which the other girls, even in coming to save her, had contracted.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

273. “Lobsters are classified in the phylum Arthropoda, same as insects. They’re bugs. And bugs are only lobsters that have learned to fly.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

274. “I was extracted, spanked, and hosed off, in that order. They wrapped me in a blanket and put me on display among six other infants, four boys, two girls, all of them, unlike me, correctly tagged. This can’t be true but I remember it: sparks slowly filling a dark screen. Someone had switched on my eyes.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

275. “It’s sad to think about those girls,” he said. “What a waste of life.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

276. “Hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

277. “I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” 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.” 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

278. “Emerson said, “I am more of a Quaker than anything else. I believe in the still, small voice.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

279. “We couldn’t imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm. And we had to smear our muzzles in their last traces, of mud marks on the floor, trunks kicked out from under them, we had to breathe forever the air of the rooms in which they killed themselves.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

280. “Who else did they have to turn to? Not their parents. Nor the neighborhood. Inside their house they were prisoners; outside, lepers. And so they hid from the world, waiting for someone – for us – to save them.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

281. “Like the Sun Belt or the Bible Belt, there exists, on this multifarious earth of ours, a Hair Belt.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

282. “I did what any loving, loyal daughter would have done who had been raised on a diet of Hercules movies.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

283. “Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

284. “We were happy when Joe the Retard showed up. He arrived on his mother’s arm, wearing his baggy Bermuda shorts and his blue baseball cap, and as usual he was grinning with the face he shared with every other mongoloid.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

285. “Part of coming from old money, apparently, was having old-person habits, those gross, adult needs and desperate palliatives. The Object was still too young for the effects to tell on her. She didn’t have eye bags yet or stained fingernails. But the appetite for sophisticated ruin was already there. She smelled like smoke, if you got close. Her stomach was a mess. But her face continued to give off its autumnal display.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

286. “Her eyes shone, burned, intent on her mission as only a creature with no doubts as to either Creation’s glory or its meaninglessness could be.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

287. “Instead of eating his lunch, he told you what Oblonsky and Levin had for lunch in Anna Karenina. Or, describing a sunset from Daniel Deronda, he failed to notice the one that was presently falling over Michigan.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

288. “He came back to us with stories of bedrooms filled with crumpled panties, of stuffed animals hugged to death by the passion of the girls, of a crucifix draped with a brassiere, of gauzy chambers of canopied beds, and of the effluvia of so many young girls becoming women together in the same cramped space.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

289. “None of us went to church, so we had a lot of time to watch them, the two parents leached of color, like photographic negatives, and then the five glittering daughters in their homemade dresses, all lace and ruffle, bursting with their fructifying flesh.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

290. “Buffeted but not broken.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

291. “Even though he tasted mysterious depths in Bonnie’s mouth, he didn’t search them out because he didn’t want her to stop kissing him.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

292. “I’ve lived more than half my life as a male, and by now everything comes naturally. When Calliope surfaces, she does so like a childhood speech impediment. Suddenly there she is again, doing a hair flip, or checking her nails. It’s a little like being possessed.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

293. “Though he’d never been religious, he realized now that he’d always believed in the soul, in a force of personality that survived death. But as his mind continued to waver, to short-circuit, he finally arrived at the cold-eyed conclusion, so at odds with his youthful cheerfulness, that the brain was just an organ like any other and that when it failed he would be no more.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

294. “Luce put his hand on the small of my back. Men have an annoying way of doing that. They touch your back as though there’s a handle there, and direct you where they want you to go.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

295. “Unbuttoning my suit jacket, I took a cigar from the inner pocket of my coat. From a still smaller pocket I took out my cigar cutter and matches. Though it wasn’t after dinner, I lit the cigar – a Davidoff Grand Cru No. 3 – and stood smoking, trying to calm myself. The cigars, the double-breasted suits – they’re a little too much. I’m well aware of that. But I need them. They make me feel better. After what I’ve been through, some overcompensation is to be expected.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

296. “What’s the reason for studying history? To understand the present or avoid it?”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

297. “Sure. Martinis. We can pretend we’re Salinger characters.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

298. “I should also mention, with the vestigial pang of a once flat-chested girl, Desdemona’s voluptuous figure. Her body was a constant embarrassment to her. It was always announcing itself in ways she didn’t sanction. In church when she knelt, in the yard when she beat rugs, beneath the peach tree when she picked fruit, Desdemona’s feminine elaborations escaped the constraints of her drab, confining clothes.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

299. “A line from Barthes she remembered: Every lover is mad, we are told. But can we imagine a madman in love?”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

300. “She walked to the cupboard, then stopped and folded her hands behind her. “It’s private. Do you mind?” she said, and Peter Sissen sped down the stairs, blushing, and after thanking Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, hurried off to tell us that Lux Lisbon was bleeding between the legs that very instant, while the fish flies made the sky filthy and the streetlamps came on.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides