Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes - Page 3

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

The lover`s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn`t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, the most solitary of places.

You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

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

Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.

She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.

The time has to be right and the heart willing.

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

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

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

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

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

Pregnancy humbles husbands. After an initial rush of male pride they quickly recognise the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction.

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.

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.

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.

A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

My goal in life is to become an adjective.