J 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you try to write posthumously, however, fashion doesn't apply. You step off the catwalk, ignoring this season's trends and resigning yourself to being unfashionable and possibly unnoticed, at least for a while. As Kurt Woolf, Kafka's first publisher in Germany, wrote to him after Kafka's book tanked, "You and we know that it is generally just the best and most valuable things that do not find their echo immediately." Fashion is the attempt to evade that principle: to be the echo of someone else's success and, therefore, to create nothing that might create an echo of its own. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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

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

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