Jeffrey Eugenides

“That was when I realized a shocking thing. I couldn't become a man without becoming The Man. Even if I didn't want…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“The Lisbon girls were thirteen (Cecelia), and fourteen (Lux), and fifteen (Bonnie), and sixteen (Mary), and seventeen (Therese).”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“Fashion is the attempt to evade that principle: to be the echo of someone else’s success and, therefore, to create nothing that…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“Though the weather was cool, the beach at Herringsdorf was dotted with quite a few diehard nudists. Primarily men, they lay walrus-like…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

I think there's a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“Élem a magam életét, nyalogatom a saját sebeimet. Lehet, hogy nem ez a legjobb megoldás, de én ilyen vagyok.”

— 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

“We had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us... calling them out of those rooms…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

We knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“But this was the thought of a depressive. An aspiring depressive, at the time. That was the odd thing about Leonard’s disease,…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

I have a very beautiful room that in my house that we bought in Princeton. It's glass on three sides, and you'd…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“One thing I learned, between addiction and depression? Depression a lot worse. Depression ain't something you just get off of. You can't…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

The lover's discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn't physical. It was extreme because you felt…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

I'm aware of cliches and I'm aware of experiments that have been done and I'm aware of a kind of deadness to…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“And yet sometimes she worried about those musty old books were doing to her. Some people majored in English to prepare for…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“... but the corset had the odd power of making her seem somehow more naked; it turned her into a forbidden, armored…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“We Greeks get married in circles, to impress upon ourselves the essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“Dr. Phil never talked about Smyrna and left the room if anyone did. He never mentioned his murdered sons and daughters. Maybe…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities. Jimmy Zizmo, crouching over the Packard's wheel has already changed past understanding.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“But most often she watched the candles as if their outcome held her own, the flames almost extinguishing themselves, but, by some…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“Little by little he'd change; he'd get older; everything he felt now would fade into memory and then into nothing.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“Even the air seemed on fire, subtly aflame with energy as it does when you are young, when the synapses are firing…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“At the time, infatuated with Nietzsche (and half asleep), Leonard didn't want to get into this argument, the truth of which wasn't…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“It might not even be that great to marry your ideal. Probably, once you attained your ideal, you got bored and wanted…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“Semiotic was the form Zipperstein's midlife crisis had taken... Instead of buying sports car, he'd bought deconstrution.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

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

— Jeffrey Eugenides

The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“Everyone in the room was so spectral-looking that Madeleine’s natural healthiness seemed suspect, like a vote for Reagan.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“If you want to have a career, my advice is don't get married. You think things have changed and there's some kind…

— Jeffrey Eugenides