Top 400 Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes (2026 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. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

314. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “I hadn’t gotten old enough 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.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

321. “It had already crossed her mind that the swimming pool might invite oblivion.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

322. “The heat precedes the fire.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

323. “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

324. “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

325. “The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

326. “Callie rises up inside me, wearing my skin like a loose robe. She sticks her little hands into the baggy sleeves of my arms. She inserts her chimp’s feet through the trousers of my legs. On the sidewalk I’ll feel her girlish walk take over, and the movement brings back a kind of emotion, a desolate and gossipy sympathy for the girls I see coming home from school.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

327. “Children were only strangers you agreed to live with.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

328. “For a long time the gods had been in close contact with humanity. Then they became disgusted, or discouraged, and they removed themselves. But maybe they would come back again, approach the stray soul who was still curious.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

330. “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

331. “I just want to make scary movies,” Jerome replied. “With occasional nudity.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

332. “English was what people who didn’t know what to major in majored in.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

333. “Bubble-gum angels swooped from top margins, or scraped their wings between teeming paragraphs. Maidens with golden hair dripped sea-blue tears into the book’s spine.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

334. “Actually, none of this might have been spoken.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

342. “Derrida is my absolute god!”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

343. “Uncle Pete made it clear: to have a girl baby, a couple should “have sexual congress twenty-four hours prior to ovulation.” That way, the swift male sperm would rush in and die off. The female sperm, sluggish but more reliable, would arrive just as the egg dropped.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

344. “Saying their names seemed to calm him, as though he were uttering incantations: lorazepam, diazepam, chlorpromazine, chlordiazepoxide, haloperidol.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

345. “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

346. “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

347. “He felt as if he were being violently emptied out, as if a big magnet were pulling his blood and fluids down into the earth. He was weeping again, unstoppably, his head like the chandelier in his grandparents’ house in Buffalo, the one that was too high for them to reach and that every time he visited had one fewer bulb alight. His head was an old chandelier, going dark.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

348. “Desdemona picked the beads up. She began to slip them one by one through her fingers, exactly as her father had done, and her grandfather, and her great-grandfather, performing a family legacy of precise, codified, thorough worrying.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

349. “Along with everyone else, I looked up. Standing in the doorway was a redheaded girl. Two clouds bumped up above, skidding past each other, and let down a beam of light. This beam struck the glass roof of the greenhouse. Passing through the hanging geraniums, it picked up the rosy light which now, in a kind of membrane, enveloped the girl. It was also possible that the sun wasn’t doing this at all, but a certain intensity, a soul ray, from my eyes.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

350. “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