504 Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.

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

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

The 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.

Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he'd learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents' fighting: his laziness, his overachieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism.

It was morning by the clock but deepest nighttime in his body.

Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.

The window gave onto a view of dove-gray roofs and balconies, each one containing the same cracked flowerpot and sleeping feline. It was as if the entire city of Paris had agreed to abide by a single understated taste. Each neighbor was doing his or her own to keep up standards, which was difficult because the French ideal wasn't clearly delineated like the neatness and greenness of American lawns, but more of a picturesque disrepair. It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.

My house fly theory is related to my theory about why time seems to go faster as you get older." "Why's that?" the girl asked. "It's proportional," Leonard explained. "When you're five, you've only been alive a couple thousand days. But by the time you're fifty, you've lived around twenty thousand days. So a day when you're five seems longer because it's a greater percentage of the whole.