Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

“We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”

“Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.”

“The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.”

“Virgin suicide
What was that she cried?
No use in stayin'
On this holocaust ride
She gave me her cherry
She's my virgin suicide”

“Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.”

“There were some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.”

“What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.”

“In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.”

“In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.”

“Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.”

“But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.”

“Every letter was a love letter.”

“She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.”

“But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.”

“So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.”

“It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.”

“She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.”

“We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.”

“I don’t know what you’re feeling. I won’t even pretend.”

“In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.”

“Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.”

“I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.”

“In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.”

“The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.”

“All wisdom ends in paradox.”

“Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.”

“There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.”

“The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.”

“That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.”

“She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.”

“We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.”

“You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.”

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in…”

“She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.”

“The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.”

“People don't save other people. People save themselves.”

“She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself.”

“and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world.”

“Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.”

“They're just memories now. Time to write them off.”

“The zipper opened all the way down our spines.”

“The time has to be right and the heart willing.”

“He remained heartbroken, which meant one of two things: either his love was pure and true and earthshakingly significant; or he was addicted to feeling forlorn, he liked being heartbroken.”

“Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.”

“The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.”

“Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.”

“During a warm winter rain… the basins of her collarbones collected water.”

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”

“It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.”

“The only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream everyone has together.”

“it's amazing what you can get used to.”

“Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.”

“The trees like lungs filling with air
My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair”

“Scars crossed her welded wrists.”

“Their desire was silent yet magnificent, like a thousand daisies attuning their faces toward the path of the sun.”

“College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.”

“Grief is natural,' she said. 'Overcoming it is a matter of choice.”

“The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.”

“I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sky was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.”

“We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it—that makes no sense. What mycould never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.”

“She wanted out of that decorating scheme.”

“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.”

“But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant”

“To start with, look at all the books.”

“Who are you, anyway?
-Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.”

“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.”