Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.

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

He knew a lot about his grandparents - and perhaps he feels he's been endowed with abilities to go into people's heads who are long dead - but, to a certain extent, he's making it up.

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.

There is a small window of opportunity for freckled girls to tan.

We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.

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.

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness", "joy", or "regret". Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions.

Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.

Scars crossed her welded wrists.

Usually my ideas are small.

We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.

The zipper opened all the way down our spines.

Bubble gum angels swooped from top margins or scraped their wings between teeming paragraphs, maidens with golden hair dripped sea blue tears into the books spine, grape-colored whales spouted blood around a newspaper item (pasted in) listing arrivals to the endangered spieces list. Six hatchlings cried from shattered shells near an entry made on Easter. Cecilia had filled the pages with a profusion of colors and curlicues, candyland ladders and striped shamrocks.

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.

I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.

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 life.

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.

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.

Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.

no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.

The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I had a briefcase at one point, but it was a kind of 1980s New Wave briefcase. It was made of some kind of cardboard and it had metal hinges. It was kind of faux industrial looking, and I used to carry my books in it rather than a backpack. I didn't want to have normal student accoutrements.

In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.

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

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

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

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.

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.

There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.

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

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.

She wanted out of the decorating scheme.

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.

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

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

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

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