Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

About Jeffrey Eugenides:

Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American novelist and short story writer. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011). The Virgin Suicides has been filmed, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before, and the pleasure you get from writing - rare but profound - remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzer...

Jeffrey Eugenides

If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims--these are lucky eventualites but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding famili...

Jeffrey Eugenides

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.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Tessio Zizmo had been a virgin when she married Milton Stephanides at the age of 22. Their engagement,which coincided with the Second World War, had been a chaste affair. My mother was proud of the way she'd managed to simultaneously kindle and snuff...

Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was no less than a guerrilla uprising. The Second American Revolution.

Jeffrey Eugenides

The last thing the hockey ball symbolized was Time itself, the unstoppability of it, the way we're chained to our bodies, which are chained to Time.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be peopl...

Jeffrey Eugenides

As they were walking, a beggar came up, holding his hand out and crying, "Baksheesh! Baksheesh!" Mike kept on going but Mitchell stopped. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out twenty paise and placed it in the beggar's dirty hand. Mike said, "I used...

Jeffrey Eugenides

It was always embarrassing when professors assigned their own books. Even Madeleine, who found all the reading hard going, could tell that Zipperstein’s contribution to the field was reformulative and second-tier.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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.

Jeffrey Eugenides

I don't want to ruin your life," Leonard said in a gentler tone. "You're not ruining it." "The drugs just slow the process down. But the end's inevitable. The question is, how to turn this thing off?" He jabbed at his head with his index finger. "It'...

Jeffrey Eugenides

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.

Jeffrey Eugenides

He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.

Jeffrey Eugenides

They thought depression was like bieng 'depressed'. They thought it was like being in a bad mood, only worse. Therefore, they tried to get him to snap out of it.

Jeffrey Eugenides

College feminists made fun of skyscrapers, saying they were phallic symbols. They said the same thing about space rockets, even though, if you stopped to think about it, rockets were shaped the way they were not because of phallocentrism but because ...

Jeffrey Eugenides

Author Bio

  • NameJeffrey Eugenides
  • DescriptionNovelist, short story writer, teacher
  • BornMarch 8, 1960
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship