Jeffrey Eugenides: Quotes about life

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived—bound, in other words, for 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.”

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

“Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.”

“And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.”

“She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand.”

“She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.”