Top 400 Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

361. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

363. “Derrida is my absolute god!”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

364. “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

365. “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

366. “We were reckless with the implications.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

367. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

369. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

371. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

375. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

377. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

379. “When he smiled, however, you saw the softness in his eyes, which made it clear that Lefty was in fact no gangster but the pampered, bookish son of comfortably well-off parents.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

381. “After the first roll of her eyes the Object resettled her gaze on mine, and then what she was feeling showed only there, in the green depths her eyes revealed. Otherwise she was motionless. Only my hand moved, and my feet on the rail, pushing the swing. This went on for three minutes, or five, or fifteen. I have no idea. Time disappeared. Somehow we were still not quite conscious of what we were doing. Sensation dissolved straight into forgetting.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

383. “There’s a kind of purity in that, the purity of childhood.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

384. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

386. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

388. “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

389. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides