Life Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

Don't waste your time on life.

— Jeffrey Eugenides

My goal in life is to become an adjective,

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“what really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“She had just started living like a grown-up and she'd never felt more vulnerable, frightened or confused in her life.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“Mr. da Silva had a relevant quotation for everything that happened to him and in this way evaded real life.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“I do not think the patient truly meant to end her life. Her act was a cry for help.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.

— Jeffrey Eugenides

Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“I'm not sure, with a grandmother like mine, if you can ever become a true American in the sense of believing that…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“My goal in life is to become an adjective," Leonard said. "People would go around saying, 'That was so Bankheadian.' Or, 'A…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly

— Jeffrey Eugenides

Being a writer is a solitary life. So the little part of me that's an actor still enjoys the theatrical part of…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment.…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“I don't want to ruin your life," Leonard said in a gentler tone. "You're not ruining it." "The drugs just slow the…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“What was interesting about being the needy one was how much in love you felt. It was almost worth it. This dependency…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“But it rained all the time, fog covered the fields, and by then he was reading Tolstoy. There were some books that…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

When I'm creating a character, it's a little bit like what my theater teachers used to tell me about Stanislavsky, like if…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy he was controlling, that this…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

Though at this moment she felt abused, abandoned, and ashamed of herself, Madeleine knew that she was still young, that she had…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“There’s a thing they’ve figured out about love. Scientifically. They’ve done studies to find out what keeps couples together. Do you know…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

For the eternity that Lux Lisbon looked at him, Trip Fontaine looked back, and the love he felt at that moment, truer…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“...the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“There were some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“He didn't understand how she had bewitched him, nor why having done so she promptly forgot his existence, and in desperate moods…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“I am living through days as happy as those God keeps for his chosen people; and whatever becomes of me, I can…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets." (...) "Obviously, Doctor," she said,…

— Jeffrey Eugenides