Eugenides Quotes & Sayings

I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Semiotic was the form Zipperstein's midlife crisis had taken... Instead of buying sports car, he'd bought deconstrution. — Jeffrey Eugenides

But most often she watched the candles as if their outcome held her own, the flames almost extinguishing themselves, but, by some greed of oxygen, persisting. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I didn't think about being king," he said, his voice hoarse.
Eddis stared. "Your capacity to land yourself in a mess because you didn't think first, Eugenides, will never cease to amaze me. What do you mean you didn't think about being king? Is Attolia going to marry you and move into my library? — Megan Whalen Turner

No friend had I made there, but I wasn't with this group to make friends, and besides, he sneered too much. I've found that people who sneer are almost always sneering at me. — Megan Whalen Turner

Eddis looked around as if recalling a question that had nagged at her for several hours. "Where's Eugenides?" she asked.
For a moment the Attolian queen was immobile, her smile gone as if it had never been. The horse under her threw up its head as if the bit had twitched against its delicate mouth.
"Locked in a room," Attolia said flatly. "In Ephrata."
The smile faded from Eddis' face.
"I ordered the other prisoners released," Attolia explained. "I forgot that I had him locked up separately. I doubt my sensechal will have released him without my specific instruction to do so."
"You forgot?" Eddis asked.
"I forgot," Attolia said firmly, daring Eddis to contradict her.
"You will marry him?" Eddis asked, hesitant again.
"I said I would," snapped Attolia, and turned her horse away. Eddis followed. When they joined their officers, Attolia gave brisk orders and then rode on, heading back toward Ephrata without waiting for Eddis. — Megan Whalen Turner

How long could we remain true to the girls? How long could we keep their memory pure? As it was, we didn't know them any longer, and their new habits - of opening a window, for instance, to throw out a wadded paper towel - made us wonder if we had ever really known them, or if our vigilance had been only the fingerprinting of phantoms. — Jeffrey Eugenides

She was the stone-faced queen, then and ever after. She had needed the mask to rule, and she had been glad to have it. She wondered if Eugenides was glad of his. — Megan Whalen Turner

There's a time to talk and a time for silence. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. — Jeffrey Eugenides

A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Our fellow Negro citizens could be summed up in something Tessie said after watching Sidney Poitier's performance in To Sir with Love, which opened a month before the riots. She said, You see, they can speak perfectly normal if they want. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I should also mention, with the vestigial pang of a once flat-chested girl, Desdemona's voluptuous figure. — Jeffrey Eugenides

A girl's not a watermelon you plug a hole in to see if it's sweet. — Jeffrey Eugenides

But it rained all the time, fog covered the fields, and by then he was reading Tolstoy. There were some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things. A Confession was a book like that. — Jeffrey Eugenides

There's a scabbard for every dagger,' the madam says in Turkish as the whores laugh. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Gathered in the folding chairs of the meeting room, they made a diverse group with the drug-addicted, a perfect democracy of collapse. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Like the Sun Belt or the Bible Belt, there exists, on this multifarious earth of ours, a Hair Belt. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Almost overnight it became laughable to read writers like Cheever or Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about anally deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France. The reason de Sade was preferable was that his shocking sex scenes weren't about sex but politics. They were therefore anti-imperialist, anti-bourgeois, anti-patriarchal, and anti-everything a smart young feminist should be against. — Jeffrey Eugenides

We lost them in the vastness of their dresses and found them again, squeezed the pulp of their bodies and inhaled the perfume of their exertion. A few of us grew brave enough to insert our legs between theirs and to press our agony against them. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Would you have your hand back, Eugenides? And lose Attolia? And see Attolia lost to the Mede?'
Eugenides's eyes were open. In front of his face the floor was littered with tiny bits of glass that glittered in the candlelight.
'You have your answer, Little Thief. — Megan Whalen Turner

I did what any loving, loyal daughter would have done who had been raised on a diet of Hercules movies. — Jeffrey Eugenides

My house fly theory is related to my theory about why time seems to go faster as you get older."
"Why's that?" the girl asked.
"It's proportional," Leonard explained. "When you're five, you've only been alive a couple thousand days. But by the time you're fifty, you've lived around twenty thousand days. So a day when you're five seems longer because it's a greater percentage of the whole. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.' — Jeffrey Eugenides

I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I am living through days as happy as those God keeps for his chosen people; and whatever becomes of me, I can never say that I have not tasted the purest joys of life. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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. — Jeffrey Eugenides

it's amazing what you can get used to. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Even the air seemed on fire, subtly aflame with energy as it does when you are young, when the synapses are firing wildly and death is far away. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The pains they took to make themselves smooth! The rashes the creams left! The futility of it all! The enemy, hair, was invincible. It was life itself. — Jeffrey Eugenides

What was interesting about being the needy one was how much in love you felt ... He'd lost the ability to be an asshole. Now he was smitten, and it felt both tremendous and scary. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I have a very beautiful room that in my house that we bought in Princeton. It's glass on three sides, and you'd think that's the perfect place to write. Somehow in that nice room I feel too exposed, and I can notice I'm too distracted by things going on, so I end up writing in a not-very-nice office bedroom. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I think it is important to remind people of the extent of our free will. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Aunt Zo, who never missed a chance to lament her marriage, had said at dinner in her comedienne's voice, My husband. Always the bridesmaid and never the bride. — Jeffrey Eugenides

All wisdom ends in paradox. — Jeffrey Eugenides

How do you write about something, even something real and painful-like suicide-when all of the writing that's been done on that subject has robbed you of any originality of expression? — Jeffrey Eugenides

It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the "Giulia" blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn't remember. Propellers churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began to spin. Red, yellow, blue, green, they untangled toward the pier, slowly at first, one revolution every ten seconds, then faster and faster as the boat picked up speed. Passengers held the yarn as long as possible, maintaining the connection to faces disappearing onshore. But finally, one by one, the balls ran out. The strings of yarn flew free, rising on the breeze. — Jeffrey Eugenides

He was like a statue being chiseled away from the inside, hollowed out. As more and more of his thoughts gave him pain, Milton had increasingly avoided them. Instead he concentrated on the few that made him feel better, the bromides about everything working out. Milton, quite simply, had ceased to think things through. — Jeffrey Eugenides

At the time, infatuated with Nietzsche (and half asleep), Leonard didn't want to get into this argument, the truth of which wasn't that all religions were equally valid but that they were equally nonsensical. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he'd learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents' fighting: his laziness, his overachieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Biosynthesis and peripheral action of testosterone, — Jeffrey Eugenides

Upset at the sight of blood?" he said. "Not my wife, Ornon."
"Your blood, " the ambassador pointed out. Eugenides glanced at the hook in his arm and conceded the point. "Yes," he said. — Megan Whalen Turner

Mr. da Silva had a relevant quotation for everything that happened to him and in this way evaded real life. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Phyllida's hair was where her power resided. It was expensively set into a smooth dome, like a band shell for the presentation of that long-running act, her face. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Her face was calm, but inside she was tense. — Jeffrey Eugenides

He had been a teacher so long he had a sink in his room. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Dr. Philbosian smelled like an old couch, of hair oil and spilled soup, of unscheduled naps. — Jeffrey Eugenides

They thought depression was like bieng 'depressed'. They thought it was like being in a bad mood, only worse. Therefore, they tried to get him to snap out of it. — Jeffrey Eugenides

We would have died without the additional men," he admitted matter-of-factly. "But we would have taken the entire Mede army with us. Poets would have written about us, and songs would have been sung about us-"
"For all the good that would have done your dead bodies," Eugenides cynically interrupted.
"Well, I wasn't looking forward to it," said Sounis caustically. "But over our dead bodies the Medes would never have been accepted by the people of Sounis. Much more likely that they would have allied with Attolia." He looked at Eugenides, who was still eyeing him in surprise. "I didn't expect to die," he said. "I knew you would send help."
"Why?"
It was Sounis's turn to be surprised. He said, "You told me you needed me to be Sounis. I am. I needed my king to send me help. You did. There had to be reinforcements at Oneia, so they were there." To him it was obvious.
Eugenides swallowed. "I see. — Megan Whalen Turner

Now I've given up any hope of lasting fame or literary perfection. I don't care if I write a great book anymore, but just one which, whatever its flaws, will leave a record of my impossible life. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Then one Sunday morning, before winter break, Abby's boyfriend, Whitney, materialized at their kitchen table, reading something called "Of Grammatology". When Madeleine asked what the book was about, she was given to understand by Whitney that the idea of a book being "about" something was exactly what this book was against, and that, if it was "about" anything, then it was about the need to stop thinking of books as being about things. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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. — Jeffrey Eugenides

It's then I smell smoke. "You even smoke while you brush your teeth?"
She looks at me sideways. "Menthol", she says. — Jeffrey Eugenides

She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she'd remember the brutal fact that had caused it. — Jeffrey Eugenides

One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils. — Jeffrey Eugenides

My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood. — Jeffrey Eugenides

As one does the return of sun after winter, I stood still and accepted the warm glow of possibility, of feeling right in the company of this small, oddly fierce person, with the inky hair and the lovely, unemphasized body. — Jeffrey Eugenides

There are a lot of things a person with two hands couldn't steal," Eddis said.
"So?"
"If it's impossible to steal them with two hands, it's no more impossible to steal them with one. Steal peace, Eugenides. Steal me some time. — Megan Whalen Turner

The two of them, father and son, lived like roommates, stumbling upon each other in their matching peacock robes, bitching over who used up the coffee, but by afternoon they drifted in the pool together, bumping the sides, compatriots in the search for a little passion on earth. They — Jeffrey Eugenides

[ ... ] and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The humming of my parents' voices from behind my bedroom wall, which throughout my childhood had filled me with a sense of security, had now become a source of anxiety and panic. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I was aware that you weren't supposed to write about suburbia, that it was undignified in some way, the subject matter not momentous enough. And so, for a long time, that kept me from writing about it. But once I began, I realized it was just as interesting as anywhere else. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I spend most of every day writing. I like to write every day if I can. I don't start extremely early. — Jeffrey Eugenides

So Sophos thinks you're going to marry me."
"While I think you'll marry Sophos."
"I might. We'll see what he's like when he grows up. — Megan Whalen Turner

Two things mania did were to keep you up all night and to enable nonstop sex: pretty much the definition of college. — Jeffrey Eugenides

We were reckless with the implications — Jeffrey Eugenides

When I'm creating a character, it's a little bit like what my theater teachers used to tell me about Stanislavsky, like if you're using sense memory to do a scene - if you have to cry in a scene, you try to remember something in your life that made you cry and you use that in order to get the tears. — Jeffrey Eugenides

He left in a state of distraction and a winter coat. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Part of my interest was zoological. I's never seen a creature with so many freckles before. A Big Bang had occurred, originating at the bridge of her nose, and the force of this explosion had sent galaxies hurtling and drifting every end of her curved, warm-blooded universe. There were clusters of freckles on her forearms and wrists, an entire Milky Way spreading across her forehead, even a few sputtering quasars flung into the wormholes of her ears. — Jeffrey Eugenides

When I think back about my immediate reaction to that redheads girl, it seems to spring from an appreciation of natural beauty. I mean the heart pleasure you get from looking at speckled leaves or the palimpsested bark of plane trees in Provence. There was something richly appealing to her color combination, the ginger snaps floating in the milk-white skin, the golden highlights in the strawberry hair. it was like autumn, looking at her. It was like driving up north to see the colors. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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

The gates were doing something to him already, because as he raised his hand to wave back at his parents, Mitchell felt ten years old again, tearing up, choked with feeling for these two human beings who, like figures from myth, had possessed the ability throughout his life to blend into the background, to turn to stone or wood, only to come alive again, at key moments like this, to witness his hero's journey. Lillian — Jeffrey Eugenides

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 — Jeffrey Eugenides

From my birth when they went undetected, to my baptism where they upstaged the priest, to my troubled adolescence when they didn't do much of anything and then did everything at once, my genitals have been the most significant thing that ever happened to me. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Because we watched her so closely out of the corners of our eyes, everything she did made too much noise, her cigarette smoke got into everything, she drank too much wine at dinner. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Here's a question I still can't answer: Did I see through the male tricks because I was destined to scheme that way myself? Or do girls see through the tricks, too, and just pretend not to notice? — Jeffrey Eugenides

She wasn't all that interested, as a reader, in the reader. She was still partial to that increasingly eclipsed entity: the writer. Madeleine had a feeling that most semiotic theorists had been unpopular as children, often bullied or overlooked, and so had directed their lingering rage onto literature. They wanted to demote the author. They wanted a book, that hard-won, transcendent thing, to be a text, contingent, indeterminate, and open for suggestions. They wanted the reader to be the main thing. Because they were readers.
Whereas Madeleine was perfectly happy with the idea of genius. She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself. She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it. — Jeffrey Eugenides

At the same time, it's a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to give a sense that Cal, in writing his story, is perhaps inventing his past as much as recalling it. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Girls forbidden to dance would only attract husbands with bad complexions and sunken chests. — Jeffrey Eugenides

And you can feel it in the air, they way the air has somehow been keeping score. — Jeffrey Eugenides

within the frosted bushes. It was only in — Jeffrey Eugenides

Lux's frequent forged excuses from phys. ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t's and b's of her mother's signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L's reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself. — Jeffrey Eugenides

... hearts wrung with anguish, the anguish of having children, a vulnerability as astonishing as the capacity for love that parenthood brings. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The matter with us is you. — Jeffrey Eugenides

She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy he was controlling, that this had been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so involved with operating the dummy that he, the ventriloquist, had ceased to have a personality, becoming just an arm stuffed up the puppet's back. — Jeffrey Eugenides

She wanted out of the decorating scheme. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. — Jeffrey Eugenides

He knew a lot about his grandparents - and perhaps he feels he's been endowed with abilities to go into people's heads who are long dead - but, to a certain extent, he's making it up. — Jeffrey Eugenides

In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Why did you come if not to murder my king?"
"I came to steal his magus."
"You can't," said the magus in question.
"I can steal anything," Eugenides corrected him, "even with one hand. — Megan Whalen Turner