Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.

Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.

Being a writer is a solitary life. So the little part of me that's an actor still enjoys the theatrical part of reading and doing the voices and telling the story.

There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.

I wanted to be an actor. My parents were not too keen on that.

Detroit's a great music town. If your interaction with it was mainly musical, I'm sure you have a good opinion of the place.

I'm constantly having doubts and moments of depression and then excitement and then back into the slough of despond.

I think there's a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to do with the method acting that I was taught in high school and college.

At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with, and he reached out in order to meet her for the first time.

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

Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.

Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking its passage for some reason.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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