504 Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

Her tragedy hadn’t made her more approachable, and in fact lent her the unknowable quality of a person who had suffered more than could be expressed.

People don’t save other people. People save themselves.

But then she came closer and we saw the light in her eyes we have been looking for ever since.

You can tell when something’s not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don’t go away.

Whatever happened now would become the truth, that whatever he seemed to be would become what he was – already an American, in other words.

I want an ending that’s satisfying. I’m more of a classical writer than a modernist one in that I want the ending to be coherent and feel like an ending. I don’t like when it just seems to putter out. I mean, life is chaotic enough.

We’re all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.

Pay no attention to the terrors that visit you in the night. The psyche is at its lowest ebb then, unable to defend itself. The desolation that envelops you feels like truth, but isn’t. It’s just mental fatigue masquerading as insight.

He wanted women to love him, all women, beginning with his mother and going on from there. Therefore, whenever any woman got mad at him, he felt maternal disapproval crashing down upon his shoulders, as if he’d been a naughty boy.