504 Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

Where else would she feel more comfortable than in this subterranean realm where people wrote down what they couldn’t say, where they gave voice to their most shameful longings and knowledge?

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.

She’d become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

I spend most of every day writing. I like to write every day if I can. I don’t start extremely early.

His lost look of a man who realized that all this dying was going to be the only life he ever had.

But maybe they understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn’t waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing, I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.

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.

I saw the movie, he said. I know what it’s about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so – he leaned toward us – their tits bleed.

I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever.