504 Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

Figures. They let you in for free. Then you gotta pay for the rest of your life.

Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it’s a character that’s very different from you.

They’re just memories now. Time to write them off.

Some Pulitzer winners – novelists – have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn’t been my experience.

Father Mike was popular with the church widows. They liked to crowd around him, offering him cookies and bathing in his beatific essence. Part of this essence came from Father Mike’s perfect contentment at being five foot four. His shortness had a charitable aspect to it, as though he had given away his height.

This is my country,′ Lefty said, and to prove it, he did a very American thing: he reached under the counter and produced a pistol.

Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It’s impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.

There were pencil scrawls and ink stains, dried blood, snack crumbs; and the leather binding itself was secured to the lectern by a chain. Here was a book that contained the collected knowledge of the past while giving evidence of present social conditions... The dictionary contained every word in the English language but the chain knew only a few. It knew thief and steal and, maybe, purloined. The chain spoke of poverty and mistrust and inequality and decadence.

We couldn’t imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.