Top 400 Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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. Those Finnish seal puppies, those German flounders – you don’t see them much anymore. Only Nikes, on Basque, on Dutch, on Siberian feet.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

302. “We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

303. “And the artists were the worst, the painters and the writers, because they believed they were living for art when they were really feeding their narcissism.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

304. “I hadn’t gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it’s only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you’re time-traveling. In this life we grow backwards.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

305. “Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. 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.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

306. “Obviously, doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen year-old girl.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

307. “When you’re five, you’ve only been alive a couple thousand days. But by the time you’re fifty, you’ve lived around twenty thousand days. So a day when you’re five seems longer because it’s a greater percentage of the whole.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

308. “For the first time ever we sympathized with the President because we saw how wildly our sphere of influence was misrepresented by those in no position to know what was going on.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

309. “The ground was uneven, treacherous with roots, but the pine needles were soft underfoot. For a moment, despite my foul mood, I felt it: the crisp northern Michigan delight. A slight chill to the air, even in August, something almost Russian. The indigo sky above the black bay. The smell of cedar and pine.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

310. “Only the Lisbon house remained dark, a tunnel, an emptiness, past our smoke and flames.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

311. “He had been a teacher so long he had a sink in his room.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

312. “But she had unbuckled us, it turned out, only to stall us, so that she and her sisters could die in peace.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

313. “When Annie flirted she didn’t always admit to herself that she was flirting. Sometimes she preferred to suspend her mental faculties so that she could flirt, as it were, without her mind watching. It was as if her body and mind separated, her body stepping behind a screen to remove its clothing while her mind, on the other side of the screen, paid no attention.”.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

314. “Judge Woodward envisioned the new Detroit as an urban Arcadia of interlocking hexagons. Each wheel was to be separate yet united. This dream never quite came to be. 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

315. “Downstairs, entertaining company, Desdemona heard her son’s clarinet and, as if orchestrating a harmony, let out a long sigh. For the last forty-five minutes Gus and Georgia Vasilakis and their daughter Gaia had been sitting in the living room. It was Sunday afternoon. On the coffee table a dish of rose jelly reflected light from the sparkling glasses of wine the adults were drinking. Gaia nursed a glass of lukewarm Vernor’s ginger ale. An open tin of butter cookies sat on the table.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

316. “It was impossible to be friends with guys. Every guy she’d ever been friends with had ended up wanting something else, or had wanted something else from the beginning, and had been friends only under false pretenses.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

317. “I was struck dumb by the sight of this beloved face working itself up into what looked like hatred.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

318. “Dust balls lined the steps. A half-eaten sandwich sat atop the landing where someone had felt too sad to finish it.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

319. “That’s right,” said Milton. “That’s what you call a basal thermometer. It reads the temperature down to a tenth of a degree.” He raised his eyebrows. “Normal thermometers only read every two tenths. This one does it every tenth. Try it out. Put it in your mouth.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

320. “I remember the first time we took off our clothes in front of each other. It was like unwinding bandages. I was as much of a man as Olivia could bear at that point. I was her starter kit.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

321. “She didn’t know if his perfectionism canceled out his loss of ambition, or if they were two sides of the same coin. When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

322. “Continuu sa cred ca aceste semne negre facute pe hartia alba poarta cea mai adanca semnificatie, ca daca o tin tot asa cu scrisul, as putea reusi sa prind curcubeul constiintei intr-un borcan.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

323. “Lefty and Desdemona’s cousin, Sourmelina, had gone to America and was living now in a place called Detroit. Built.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

324. “Unlike the suffering, earthbound Christs depicted at eye level on the church walls, our Christ Pantocrator was clearly transcendent, all-powerful, heaven-bestriding. He was reaching down to the apostles above the altar to present the four rolled-up sheepskins of the Gospels. And my mother, who tried all her life to believe in God without ever quite succeeding, looked up at him for guidance.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

325. “The notion made us dizzy, and we lay down on the Larsons’ carpet, which smelled of pet deodorizer and, deeper down, of pet.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

326. “It was all new to him: the memorization of strategic speeches, the trial runs of possible conversations, the yogic deep breathing, all leading up the blind, headlong dive into the staticky sea of telephone lines. He had never felt the pain of the lacklust responses, the dread of “Oh... hi”, or the quick annihilation of “Who?”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

327. “She’d always been a failed bohemian, anyway.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

328. “Or in my grandparents’s case, the circling worked like this: as they paced around the deck the first time, Lefty and Desdemona were still brother and sister. The second time, the were bride and bridegroom. And the third, they were husband and wife.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

329. “Corpul ii era ca o tulpina, sustinand laleaua creierului sau.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

330. “Let’s just say that during my travels I’ve become acquainted with interior states that collapse the distance between people. Sometimes, despite how far apart we are physically, I have drawn very close to you, right up into your innermost chamber. I can feel what you’re feeling. From here.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

331. “At Spichernstrasse the train halted to conduct an exchange of bodies. Out on the platform a street musician played a teary Slavic melody on an accordion. Wing tips gleaming, my hair still damp, I was flipping through the Frankfurter Allgemeine when she rolled her unthinkable bicycle in.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

332. “It had to do with the way the mail wasn’t delivered on time, and how potholes never got fixed, or the thievery at City Hall, or the race riots, or the 801 fires set around the city on Devil’s night. The Lisbon girls became a symbol of what was wrong with the country, the pain it inflicted on even its most innocent citizens, and in order to make things better a parents’ group donated a bench in the girls’ memory to our school.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

333. “The lovelorn English major contemplated the symbolism of this.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

334. “We weren’t prejudiced against them. We wanted to include them in our society if they would only act normal!”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

335. “But even as we make these conclusions we feel our throats plugging up, because they are both true and untrue. So much has been written about the girls in the newspapers, so much has been said over backyard fences, or related over the years in psychiatrists’ offices, that we are certain only of the insufficiency of explanations.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

336. “To my grandparents Detroit was like one big Koza Han during cocoon season. What they didn’t see were the workers sleeping on the streets...”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

337. “Acts like these – simple, humane, conscientious, forgiving – held life together.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

338. “So that was our love affair. Wordless, blinkered, a nighttime thing, a dream thing. There were reasons on my side for this as well. Whatever it was that I was was best revealed slowly, in flattering light. Which meant not much light at all. Besides, that’s the way it goes in adolescence. You try things out in the dark. You get drunk or stoned and extemporize.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

339. “She wasn’t so special, maybe. She was his ideal, but an early conception of it, and he would get over it in time.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

340. “He explained that he had arrived at college without knowing much about religion, and how, from reading English literature, he’d begun to realize how ignorant he was. The world had been formed by beliefs he knew nothing about. ‘That was the beginning,’ he said, ’realizing how stupid I was.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

341. “The heat precedes the fire.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

342. “My mother looks surprisingly pliable in those old snapshots, as though she liked nothing better than to have her man in uniform arrange her against the porches and lampposts of their humble neighborhood.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

343. “All this led up to the day Desdemona dangled a utensil over my mother’s belly. The sonogram didn’t exist at the time; the spoon was the next best thing.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

344. “Part of my interest was zoological. I’s 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 hurtling and drifting every end of her curved, warm-blooded universe. There were clusters of freckles on her forearms and wrists, an entire Milky Way spreading across her forehead, even a few sputtering quasars flung into the wormholes of her ears.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

345. “As soon as the cry reached my father, however, he marched into the kitchen to tell his mother that, this time at least, her spoon was wrong. “And how you know so much?” Desdemona asked him. To which he replied what many Americans of his generation would have: “It’s science, Ma.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

346. “Most people remember the Day of Grieving as an obscure holiday. The first three hours of school were canceled and we remained in our homerooms. Teachers passed out mimeographs related to the day’s theme, which was never officially announced, as Mrs. Woodhouse felt it inappropriate to single out the girls’ tragedy. The result was that the tragedy was diffused and universalized. As Kevin Tiggs put it, “It seemed like we were supposed to feel sorry for everything that ever happened, ever.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

347. “What was it about crazy people that made you want to shun them? The futility of reasoning with them, certainly, but also something else, something like a fear of contagion.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

348. “Did I see through the male tricks because I was destined to scheme that way myself? Or do girls see through the tricks, too, and just pretend not to notice?”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

349. “Who had known they talked so much, held so many opinions, jabbed at the world’s sights with so many fingers? Between our sporadic glimpses of the girls they had been continously living developing in ways we couldn’t imagine, reading every book on the bowdlerized family bookshelf. Somehow, too, they’d kept up dating etiquette, through television or observation at school, so that they knew how to keep the conversation flowing or fill awkward siliences.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

350. “After four years at college, nobody was anybody she knew.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides