Jeffrey Eugenides citations

“Elles nous avaient fait participer à leur folie, parce que nous ne pouvions faire autrement.”

“le monde est émotion à l’état pur, allant et venant entre ses créatures.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”