Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words.
I don't believe in "sadness", "joy", or "regret".
Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions.

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

In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.

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

Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.

There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.

The last thing the hockey ball symbolized was Time itself, the unstoppability of it, the way we're chained to our bodies, which are chained to Time.

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.

O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;
Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching Earth;
Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth
With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.
She hath no questions, she hath no replies.

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

Fin da piccole sapevano quanto poco valore il mondo attribuisse ai libri, e non perdevano tempo a leggerli. Mentre io, anche adesso, continuo a credere che quei puntini neri su fondo bianco abbiano il più alto dei significati, che se insisto a scrivere potrò cogliere l'arcobaleno della coscienza e rinchiuderlo in un barattolo.

The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.

The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.

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.

Olive trees are intimate creatures, eloquent in their twistedness. It's easy to understand why the ancients believed human spirits could be trapped inside them.

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

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

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