Top 400 Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Only the Lisbon house remained dark, a tunnel, an emptiness, past our smoke and flames.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “There is basic pain in being sentient, in being witness to the phenomenal existence of the world without any answer as to why.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

307. “Looking back now, I can only remember a time when the world seemed to have a million eyes, silently opening wherever I went. Most of the time they were camouflaged, like the closed eyes of green lizards in green trees. But then they snapped open – on the bus, in the pharmacy – and I felt the intensity of all that looking, the desire and desperation.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

309. “Aunt Zo, who never missed a chance to lament her marriage, had said at dinner in her comedienne’s voice, “My husband. Always the bridesmaid and never the bride.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “How long could we remain true to the girls? How long could we keep their memory pure? As it was, we didn’t know them any longer, and their new habits – of opening a window, for instance, to throw out a wadded paper towel – made us wonder if we had ever really known them, or if our vigilance had been only the fingerprinting of phantoms.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “I would handle the deep intellectual matters, like vibrators; she would handle the social sphere.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

322. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

324. “You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

325. “Though she carried on few extended conversations, we got an idea of her state of mind from the little that got back to us of the little she said.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

326. “A terrible thing happens when you water-ski. After you release the rope, you keep skimming over the water for a while, free. But there comes an inevitable moment when your speed fails to sustain your forward progress. The surface of the water breaks like glass. The depths open up to claim you. That was how I felt on land, watching the Object ski past. That same plunging, hopeless feeling, that emotional physics.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

327. “More and more, people forgot about the individual reasons why the girls may have killed themselves, the stress disorders and insufficient neurotransmitters, and instead put the deaths down to the girls’ foresight in predicting decadence.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “Song after song throbbed with secret pain.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

332. “The moments that led up to me fell into place as though decreed. Which, I guess, is why I think about them so much.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

333. “Behind her freckles, a blush rose to the Object’s face. She was, of course, transfixed by such information. I was speaking into her left ear. The blush spread across her face from that side, as if my words left a visible trace.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

334. “The smell of things burning that aren’t meant to burn wafts across the city: shoe polish, rat poison, toothpaste, piano strings, hernia trusses, baby cribs, Indian clubs. And hair and skin. By this time, hair and skin.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

335. “Cecilia appeared in our consciousness at odd moments, most often as we were just waking up, or staring out a car-pool window streaked with rain – she rose up in her wedding dress, muddy with the afterlife, but then a horn would honk, or our radio alarms would unleash a popular song, and we snapped back to reality.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “From five the girls had reduced themselves to four, and they were all – the living and the dead – becoming shadows.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

340. “My mother pictured a daughter as a counterinsurgent: a fellow lover of lapdogs, a seconder of proposals to attend the Ice Capades. In.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

341. “A few of us grew brave enough to insert our legs between theirs and to press our agony against them.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

342. “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

343. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

345. “They weren’t saving it,” said Mrs. Scheer. “They were saving her memory.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

346. “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

347. “But it’s mostly the act itself that brings relief, the self-forgetfulness, the diving and plunging into other lives.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

349. “Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy he was controlling, that this had been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so involved with operating the dummy that he, the ventriloquist, had ceased to have a personality, becoming just an arm stuffed up the puppet’s back.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

350. “Gathered in the folding chairs of the meeting room, they made a diverse group with the drug-addicted, a perfect democracy of collapse.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides