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.”

Source: Middlesex

“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.”

Source: The Virgin Suicides

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

Source: The Marriage Plot

“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”

Source: Middlesex

“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.”

Source: The Virgin Suicides

“It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.”

Source: Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes about life

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

Source: Middlesex

“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.”

Variant: There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.
Source: The Marriage Plot

“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.”

Source: The Virgin Suicides

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

Source: The Marriage Plot

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

Source: The Virgin Suicides

“When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.”

Source: The Marriage Plot

Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes about love

“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.”

Source: The Marriage Plot

“Every letter was a love letter.”

Source: Middlesex

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

Source: The Marriage Plot

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

Source: The Marriage Plot

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

Source: The Marriage Plot

“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”

Source: Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides: Trending quotes

“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.”

Source: Middlesex

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

Source: Middlesex