Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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

Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.

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

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

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

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.

Don't waste your time on life.

Every novelist should possess a hermaphroditic imagination.

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.

Usually my ideas are small.

I think it is important to remind people of the extent of our free will.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.

We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.

The worst thing about religion was religious people.

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.

He remained heartbroken, which meant one of two things: either his love was pure and true and earthshakingly significant; or he was addicted to feeling forlorn, he liked being heartbroken.