Top 400 Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

358. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

381. “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

382. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

400. “We were reckless with the implications.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides