Jeffrey Eugenides citations

Page 2

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Every letter was a love letter.”

“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.”

“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.”

“She wanted out of that decorating scheme.”