Top 400 Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “The mouth is small but well shaped, kissable, musical.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

352. “The lyrics might have been diary entries the girls whispered into our ears.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

353. “The two of them, father and son, lived like roommates, stumbling upon each other in their matching peacock robes, bitching over who used up the coffee, but by afternoon they drifted in the pool together, bumping the sides, compatriots in the search for a little passion on earth. They.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

354. “We passed the sticky receiver from ear to ear, the drumbeats so regular we might have been pressing our ears to the girls’ chests.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

355. “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

356. “That girl didn’t want to die,” she told us. “She just wanted out of that house.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

357. “It had to do with Leonard. With how she felt about him and how she couldn’t tell anyone. With how much she liked him and how little she knew about him. With how desperately she wanted to see him and how hard it was to do so.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

358. “And of course there was the sheer physical fact of her, the blood-tinged blade that she was, the riot of color that caught everyone’s attention.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

359. “We had never known her. They brought us here to find that out.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

361. “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

362. “We were just speaking theoretically,” said my father. “What does Uncle Pete know about having babies?” “He read this particular article in Scientific American,” Milton said. And to bolster his case: “He’s a subscriber.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

363. “General John L. Throckmorton set up the headquarters of the 101st Airborne at Southeastern High, where my parents had gone to school.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

364. “This has all been verified. Under the microscope. The male sperms are faster.” “I bet they’re stupider, too.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

365. “Hearing a beautiful music in her head, she hadn’t listened to anything anyone else was saying.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “We were reckless with the implications.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

370. “To feel so much was its own justification.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

371. “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. Or they place their hand on top of your head, paternally. Men and their hands. You’ve got to watch them every minute.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

372. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

379. “The heat precedes the fire.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

380. “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

381. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

383. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

385. “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

386. “Cecilia had released an airborne virus which the other girls, even in coming to save her, had contracted.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

388. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

391. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

400. “Derrida is my absolute god!”

— Jeffrey Eugenides