Top 400 Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “The ground was uneven, treacherous with roots, but the pine needles were soft underfoot. For a moment, despite my foul mood, I felt it: the crisp northern Michigan delight. A slight chill to the air, even in August, something almost Russian. The indigo sky above the black bay. The smell of cedar and pine.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

353. “We were reckless with the implications.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

354. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

356. “Her eyes shone, burned, intent on her mission as only a creature with no doubts as to either Creation’s glory or its meaninglessness could be.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

359. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

363. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

365. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

367. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

369. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

372. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

374. “He came back to us with stories of bedrooms filled with crumpled panties, of stuffed animals hugged to death by the passion of the girls, of a crucifix draped with a brassiere, of gauzy chambers of canopied beds, and of the effluvia of so many young girls becoming women together in the same cramped space.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

375. “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

376. “He had been a teacher so long he had a sink in his room.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “Avea cate un citat pentru fiecare lucru care i se intampla si in felul acesta evada din viata reala.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

388. “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

389. “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

390. “Even though he tasted mysterious depths in Bonnie’s mouth, he didn’t search them out because he didn’t want her to stop kissing him.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

391. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

396. “I’ve lived more than half my life as a male, and by now everything comes naturally. When Calliope surfaces, she does so like a childhood speech impediment. Suddenly there she is again, doing a hair flip, or checking her nails. It’s a little like being possessed.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

397. “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

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides