Jeffrey Eugenides: Trending quotes

“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.”

“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.”

“Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.”

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

“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.”

“Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly”

“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.”

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

“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.”