Top 400 Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 7 of 9

301. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

318. “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

319. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

321. “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

322. “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

323. “The heat precedes the fire.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

332. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

334. “The gates were doing something to him already, because as he raised his hand to wave back at his parents, Mitchell felt ten years old again, tearing up, choked with feeling for these two human beings who, like figures from myth, had possessed the ability throughout his life to blend into the background, to turn to stone or wood, only to come alive again, at key moments like this, to witness his hero’s journey. Lillian.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

335. “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

336. “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

337. “In 1922 there were barely a hundred people living in the village. Fewer than half of those were women. Of forty-seven women, twenty-one were old ladies. Another twenty were middle-aged wives. Three were young mothers, each with a daughter in diapers. One was his sister. That left two marriageable girls. Whom Desdemona now rushed to nominate.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

338. “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

339. “Pregnancy made her feel too much like an animal. It was embarrassing to be so publicly colonized. Her face felt on fire during hormone surges. She perspired; her makeup ran. The entire process was a holdover from more primitive stages of development. It linked her with the lower forms of life. She thought of queen bees spewing eggs. She thought of the collie next door, digging its hole in the backyard last spring.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

340. “Derrida is my absolute god!”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

341. “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

342. “All I know is this: despite my androgenized brain, there’s an innate feminine circularity in the story I have to tell. In any genetic history. I’m the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you have to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

343. “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

344. “I had a hunch she was American. It was the retro bike. Chrome and turquoise, it had fenders as wide as a Chevrolet’s, tires as thick as a wheelbarrow’s, and appeared to weigh at least a hundred pounds. An expatriate’s whim, that bike. I was about to use it as a pretext for starting a conversation when the train stopped again.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

345. “The mouth is small but well shaped, kissable, musical.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

346. “It was still years before Desdemona, cutting cucumbers, would lean against the corner of the kitchen table and, without realizing it, would lean in a little harder, and after that would find herself taking up that position every day, the table corner snug between her legs.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

347. “The only trust fund I have is this story, and unlike a prudent Wasp, I’m dipping into principal, spending it all...”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

348. “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

349. “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

350. “It was this kind of knowledge that led my father to trust what Uncle Pete said when it came to the reproductive timetable. His head on a throw pillow, his shoes off, Madama Butterfly softly playing on my parents’ stereo, Uncle Pete explained that, under the microscope, sperm carrying male chromosomes had been observed to swim faster than those carrying female chromosomes. This assertion generated immediate merriment among the restaurant owners and fur finishers assembled in our living room.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides