Top 242 Quotes & Sayings by Jeffrey Eugenides - Page 2

No matter how long your've been at it, you always start from scratch.

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.

It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.

She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.

our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.

Grief is natural,' she said. 'Overcoming it is a matter of choice.

That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.

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

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

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

What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn't like?

They thought depression was like bieng 'depressed'. They thought it was like being in a bad mood, only worse. Therefore, they tried to get him to snap out of it.

Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities.

People don't save other people. People save themselves.

-Who are you, anyway? -Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.

If you grew up in a house where you weren't loved, you didn't know there was an alternative.

She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.

We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.

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

Don't waste your time on life.

I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sku was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.

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. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

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.

A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.

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

If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.

It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.

When I think back about my immediate reaction to that redheads girl, it seems to spring from an appreciation of natural beauty. I mean the heart pleasure you get from looking at speckled leaves or the palimpsested bark of plane trees in Provence. There was something richly appealing to her color combination, the ginger snaps floating in the milk-white skin, the golden highlights in the strawberry hair. it was like autumn, looking at her. It was like driving up north to see the colors.

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

My goal in life is to become an adjective.

A girl's not a watermelon you plug a hole in to see if it's sweet.

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

On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.

I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.

When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.

The time has to be right and the heart willing.

All wisdom ends in paradox.

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

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

I saw the movie, he said. I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so - he leaned toward us - their tits bleed.

I don’t know what you’re feeling, I won’t even pretend

In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.

But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.

We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it--that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.” -Mrs. Karafilis

It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.

That’s how people live, by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? “Tell me a story.” That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.

Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.

They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.

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

That was the deal basically: catatonia without; frenzy within

I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants' as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.

It was the combination of many factors... With most people, suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The other two bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty.

He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.

She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.

You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight of her made you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you knew who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences. That was the hope.

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