504 Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

I know that attaching memories to books may be going out of the world, but while it lasts, it’s a strong record of your life.

I’m constantly having doubts and moments of depression and then excitement and then back into the slough of despond.

A girl’s not a watermelon you plug a hole in to see if it’s sweet.

All of a sudden America wasn’t about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!

Though the weather was cool, the beach at Herringsdorf was dotted with quite a few diehard nudists. Primarily men, they lay walrus-like on towels or boosterously congregated.

The Statue of Liberty’s gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.

It was as if her own heart had been surgically removed from her body and was being kept at a remote location, still connected to her and pumping blood through her veins, but exposed to dangers she couldn’t see: her heart in a box somewhere, in the open air, unprotected.

That was the deal basically: catatonia without; frenzy within.

I went to church. It didn’t help. In those days that was the best place to meet a girlfriend. In church! All of us praying to be different.