Books Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

38 Books quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

All Books quotes Jeffrey Eugenides’s page

Eugenides sees a book as a strong record of your life, a place where memories can sit. He cares about keeping the reader’s attention for as long as possible. He also mentions that a good story can cut through the fog of everyday noise.

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Jeffrey Eugenides

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She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

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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

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

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I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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I was engrossed with the book, I was having difficulties with it, and I just didn't notice the years were going by.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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“She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself. She thought a writer should work harder writing a…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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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

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

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The book has many different characteristics: some are extremely old-fashioned storytelling traits, but there are also a fair number of postmodern traits,…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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“Now I’ve given up any hope of lasting fame or literary perfection. I don’t care if I write a great book anymore,…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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I have a lot of novels that I haven't finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it's not going…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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I had a briefcase at one point, but it was a kind of 1980s New Wave briefcase. It was made of some…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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It wasn't conscious, but I guess that one book is the reaction to the other. The first is so imprisoned in a…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

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“But maybe they understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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“Almost overnight it became laughable to read writers like Cheever or Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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“I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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“I think about the reader. I care about the reader. Not “audience.” Not “readership.” Just the reader. That one person, alone in…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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“Then one Sunday morning, before winter break, Abby's boyfriend, Whitney, materialized at their kitchen table, reading something called "Of Grammatology". When Madeleine…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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If you think of even Tolstoy or a book like 'Anna Karenina,' you go from character to character, and each section is…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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“There were pencil scrawls and ink stains, dried blood, snack crumbs; and the leather binding itself was secured to the lectern by…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

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“She wasn't all that interested, as a reader, in the reader. She was still partial to that increasingly eclipsed entity: the writer.…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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“It was always embarrassing when professors assigned their own books. Even Madeleine, who found all the reading hard going, could tell that…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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The ideas for my books come about in two ways. There can be an intellectual idea that seems to be the reason…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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“Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights...How wonderful it was when one sentence…

Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

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More by Jeffrey Eugenides

“Only the Lisbon house remained dark, a tunnel, an emptiness, past our smoke and flames.”

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

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.

Jeffrey Eugenides

“Adolescents tend to seek love where they can find it.”

Jeffrey Eugenides

“The window was still open,” Mr Lisbon said. “I don’t think we’d ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I…

Jeffrey Eugenides

I was aware that you weren't supposed to write about suburbia, that it was undignified in some way, the subject matter not momentous enough.…

Jeffrey Eugenides

“Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the chin,…

Jeffrey Eugenides

“I don't approve of women driving, mind you. And now they get to vote!" He grumbled to himself. "Remember that play we saw ("The…

Jeffrey Eugenides

“Her face was calm, but inside she was tense.”

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 of your…

Jeffrey Eugenides

I spend most of every day writing. I like to write every day if I can. I don't start extremely early.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.

Jeffrey Eugenides

We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters,…

Jeffrey Eugenides

You can tell when something's not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don't go away.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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.

Jeffrey Eugenides