Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes
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.
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.
Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly
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.
It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.
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.
It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.
She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.
She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.
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.
There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.
In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.
What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets." (...) "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.
There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.
It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.
She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.
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.
In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.
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.
Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.
What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.
I have a lot of novels that I haven't finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it's not going anywhere. I don't publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.
I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.
She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.
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.
But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.
Pregnancy humbles husbands. After an initial rush of male pride they quickly recognise the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction.
I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.
On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.
You can tell when something's not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don't go away.
I spend most of every day writing. I like to write every day if I can. I don't start extremely early.
The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
