Jeffrey Eugenides citations

Page 3

“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.”

“But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant”

“To start with, look at all the books.”

“Who are you, anyway?
-Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.”

“Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.”

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

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

“There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.”

“This can't be true but I remember it.”

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

“The window was still open,” Mr Lisbon said. “I don’t think we’d ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close that window or else she’d go on jumping out of it forever.”

“She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.”

“Lux spent the ride dialing the radio for her favorite song. "It makes me crazy," she said. "You know they're playing it somewhere, but you have to find it.”

“We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.”

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

“It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.”

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

“Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.”

“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.”

“All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and one, who went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her collarbones collected water.”

“It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.”

“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”

“What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn't like?”

“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.”

“We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.”

“Pregnancy humbles husbands. After an initial rush of male pride they quickly recognise the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction.”

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

“Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century.”

“If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.”