504 Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

Next to it were five potted photographs of the Lisbon girls, pinned with rusty tacks. We didn’t remember putting them up, but there they were, dim from time and weather so that all we could make out were phosphorescent outlines of the girls’ bodies, each a different glowing letter of an unknown alphabet.

In the end, it wasn’t death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.

Even the air seemed on fire, subtly aflame with energy as it does when you are young, when the synapses are firing wildly and death is far away.

She was a large, disordered woman, like a child’s drawing that didn’t stay within the lines.

The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents’ lives.

No matter how long your’ve been at it, you always start from scratch.

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.

The sonogram didn’t exist at the time; the spoon was the next best thing.

We’re all well-acquainted with depression, we all know what the low moods are, but the mania was not something I knew much about. I didn’t know that it would make someone dress extravagantly or start to pun, and to stay up and drink.