Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls' emotional state at that point, he said, Buffeted but not broken.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

They made us participate in their own madness,because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Discussing it later, many of us felt we suffered a mental dislocation at that moment, which only grew worse through the course of the remaining deaths. The prevailing symptom of this state was an inability to recall any sound. Truck doors slammed silently; Lux's mouth screamed silently; and the street, the creaking tree limbs, the streetlight clicking different colors, the electric buzz of the pedestrian crossing box - all these usually clamorous voices hushes, or had begun shrieking at a pitch too high for us to hear, though they sent chills up our spines. Sound returned only once Lux had gone. Televisions erupted with canned laughter. Fathers splashed, soaking aching backs.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

I mean, in the end it wasn't up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to use before we're born.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

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.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

This whole country's stolen.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

The more she thought about it, the more Madeleine understood that extreme solitude didn't just describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she'd always felt when she was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

The lover`s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn`t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, the most solitary of places.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Given the choice, a yeast cell's ideal state is to be diploid. But if it's in an environment with a lack of nutrients, you know what happens?The diploids break into haploids again. Solitary little haploids. Because, in a crisis, it's easier to survive as a single cell.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

We realized that the version of the world [our parents] rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

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.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was no less than a guerrilla uprising.The Second American Revolution.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

They didn't exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen. Even in sensible school shoes, she shuffled as though barefoot, and the baggy apparel Mrs. Lisbon bought for her only increased her appeal, as though after undressing she had put on whatever was handy. In corduroys her thighs rubbed together, buzzing, and there was always at least one untidy marvel to unravel him: an untucked shirttail, a sock with a hole, a ripped seam showing underarm hair. She carted her books from class to class but never opened them. Her pens and pencils were as temporary as Cinderella's broom. When she smiled, her mouth showed too many teeth, but at night Trip Fontaine dreamed of being bitten by each one.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

If they were going to kill you, would they knock?

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

This was a characteroloical prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Even our parents seemed to agree more and more with the television version of things, listening to the reporters' inanities as though they could tell us the truth about our own lives.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Listening to Leonard, Madeleine felt impoverished by her happy childhood. She never wondered why she acted the way she did, or what effect her parents had had on her personality. Being fortunate had dulled her powers of observation.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. 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.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of a shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

But as I peeked at my brother's inert body....I was aware only of what a strange thing it was to be male. Society discriminated against women, no question. But what about the discrimination of being sent war? Which sex was really thought to be expendable.

~ 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

For the first time ever we sympathized with the President because we saw how wildly our sphere of influence was misrepresented by those in no position to know what was going on.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

It was always embarrassing when professors assigned their own books. Even Madeleine, who found all the reading hard going, could tell that Zipperstein’s contribution to the field was reformulative and second-tier.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

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

~ Jeffrey Eugenides