Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes
no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.
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
The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.
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.
We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.
Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.
Where else would she feel more comfortable than in this subterranean realm where people wrote down what they couldn't say, where they gave voice to their most shameful longings and knowledge?
Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.
You used to be able to tell a person's nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that.
Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.
The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.
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.
But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.
that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep
girls forbidden to dance would only attract husbands with bad complexions and sunken chests.
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.
My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.
Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been my experience.
I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.
But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.
I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.
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.
If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.
So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
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.
Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope
Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself.
The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.
If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.
Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.
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.
She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.
She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.
It was as if, before she'd met him, her blood had circulated grayly around her body, and now ir was all oxygenated and red. She was petrified of becoming the half-alive person she'd been before.
Their desire was silent yet magnificent, like a thousand daisies attuning their faces toward the path of the sun.
Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.
They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.
I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are.
