Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he'd learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents' fighting: his laziness, his overachieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism.
Jeffrey EugenidesBut, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.
Jeffrey EugenidesNow all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.
Jeffrey EugenidesIn 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.
Jeffrey EugenidesI think there's a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to do with the method acting that I was taught in high school and college.
Jeffrey EugenidesWe 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.
Jeffrey Eugenides