Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes - Page 9

It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.

One of the reasons that art is important to me is sometimes it actually feels more coherent than life. It orders the chaos.

Three times a day Petrovich showed up at the nurse's office for his injections, always using the hypodermic needle himself like the most craven of junkies, though after shooting up he would play the concert piano in the auditorium with astounding artistry, as though insulin were the elixir of genius.

What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets." (...) "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.

it's amazing what you can get used to.

Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.

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

She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.

For the eternity that Lux Lisbon looked at him, Trip Fontaine looked back, and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive real life, still plagued him, even now in the desert, with his looks and health wasted. 'You never know what'll set the memory off,' he told us. 'A baby's face. A bell on a cat's collar. Anything.' They didn't exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen.

Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.

The more she thought about it, the more Madeleine understood that extreme solitude didn't just describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she'd always felt when she was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it.

I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.

Well, marriage doesn't function in the way it used to in terms of deciding our fate, but it's in our heads, and it determines a lot of our actions. Like, right now, if you think about gay marriage - and they just started having the first gay marriages in New York - it shows what a potent idea marriage remains for people.

College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.

Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century.

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

I was beginning to understand something about normality. 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. But people-and especially doctors- had doubts about normality. They weren't sure normality was up the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.

Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.

Virgin suicide What was that she cried? No use in stayin' On this holocaust ride She gave me her cherry She's my virgin suicide

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.

Detroit's a great music town. If your interaction with it was mainly musical, I'm sure you have a good opinion of the place.

I'm constantly having doubts and moments of depression and then excitement and then back into the slough of despond.

I remember liking to write stories pretty early on. In fourth or fifth grade, they would give us the beginning of a story, and we were supposed to finish it. I remember liking that. But I didn't think about deciding to become a writer until high school at about the age of 16.

If I write a character, instead of looking from the outside, like maybe a journalist would, trying to describe them physically and figuring out what kind of things they might be interested in or have in their house, I don't really do it that way. I try to feel what it would be like to be inside this person, to be them.

When I'm creating a character, it's a little bit like what my theater teachers used to tell me about Stanislavsky, like if you're using sense memory to do a scene - if you have to cry in a scene, you try to remember something in your life that made you cry and you use that in order to get the tears.