Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

I 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.

If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.

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

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

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.

I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down. You won’t have to explain things that don’t need explaining. You’ll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don’t wish to be condescended to.

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

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

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

Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

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.

and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world

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

We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.

The humming of my parents' voices from behind my bedroom wall, which throughout my childhood had filled me with a sense of security, had now become a source of anxiety and panic.

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.

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.

Sourmelina's secret (as Aunt Zo put it): 'Lina was one of those women they named the island after.

On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.

My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.

We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.

But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant

But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.

We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it--that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.” -Mrs. Karafilis

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

The trees like lungs filling with air. My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair.

I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.

When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.

To be inclusive you must accommodate different levels of sophistication.

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.

Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.

Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.

that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep

The time has to be right and the heart willing.

It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.

-Who are you, anyway? -Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.

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.

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

Lux’s frequent forged excuses from phys. Ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t’s and b’s of her mother’s signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L’s reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x.

Remember that day you said you loved me? Remember that? See, you could do that because you're basically a sane person, who grew up in a loving, sane family. You could take a risk like that. But in my family we didn't go around saying we loved each other. We went around screaming at each other. So what do I do, when you say you love me? I go and undermine it.

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

People don't save other people. People save themselves.

My goal in life is to become an adjective.

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.

But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.

In the midst of my skeptical, cynical, often pessimistic nature exists a slender capacity to believe, if only temporarily, in a guiding, unseen power, and whenever this happens, I go with it. That's what inspiration is. You don't get it from the gods. You make it.

All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and one, who went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her collarbones collected water.