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.
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For our own part, we learned a great deal about the techniques of love, and because we didn't know the words to denote what we saw, we had to make up our own. That was why we spoke of "yodeling in the canyon" and "tying the tube," of "groaning in the...

Jeffrey Eugenides

Discussing it later, many of us felt we suffered a mental dislocation at that moment, which only grew worse through the course of the remaining deaths. The prevailing symptom of this state was an inability to recall any sound. Truck doors slammed sil...

Jeffrey Eugenides

When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls' emotional state at that point, he said, "Buffeted but not broken.

Jeffrey Eugenides

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...

Jeffrey Eugenides

Even our parents seemed to agree more and more with the television version of things, listening to the reporters' inanities as though they could tell us the truth about our own lives.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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.

Jeffrey Eugenides

On 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 bas...

Jeffrey Eugenides

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 could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.

Jeffrey Eugenides

[...] and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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...

Jeffrey Eugenides

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

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.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Desdemona, mourning her parents, was still imprisoned by the past. And so she stood on the mountain, looking down at the emancipated city, and felt cheated by her ability to feel happy by everybody else.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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 it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid ...

Jeffrey Eugenides

According to an ancient Chinese legend, one day in the year 240 B.C., Princess Si Ling-chi was sitting under a mulberry tree when a silkworm cocoon fell into her teacup. When she tried to remove it, she noticed that the cocoon had begun to unravel in...

Jeffrey Eugenides

Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Author Bio

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