Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.

I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.

You don't understand me. I'm a teenager. I've got problems!

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.

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

Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.

The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in.

It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.

The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season.

The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.

People don't save other people. People save themselves.

It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.

Grief is natural,' she said. 'Overcoming it is a matter of choice.

Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities.

That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.

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

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 it or else she’d go on jumping out of it forever

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.

He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.

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.

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.

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

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

No matter how long your've been at it, you always start from scratch.

If you grew up in a house where you weren't loved, you didn't know there was an alternative.

She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.

If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.

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?

I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sku was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.

That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.

A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

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

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

My goal in life is to become an adjective.

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.

That was the deal basically: catatonia without; frenzy within

The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.

-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.

I know that attaching memories to books may be going out of the world, but while it lasts, it's a strong record of your life.

Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.

One of the reasons that art is important to me is sometimes it actually feels more coherent than life. It orders the chaos.

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

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.

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.

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

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

It was morning by the clock but deepest nighttime in his body.

Sourmelina's secret (as Aunt Zo put it): 'Lina was one of those women they named the island after.