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.
Jeffrey EugenidesEveryone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.
Jeffrey EugenidesYou can tell when something's not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don't go away.
Jeffrey EugenidesIf you think of even Tolstoy or a book like 'Anna Karenina,' you go from character to character, and each section is from the third person perspective of a different character, so you get to see the whole world a little more kaleidoscopically that way. That's traditional narrative manner, and I haven't done a book like that before, but I enjoyed it.
Jeffrey EugenidesMaybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.
Jeffrey EugenidesThe only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream everyone has together.
Jeffrey EugenidesOn the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.
Jeffrey Eugenides