504 Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

The more she thought about it, the more Madeleine understood that extreme solitude didn’t just describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she’d always felt when she was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it.

Out past the weekly glimpsed windows, out past the street, lived the world, which had, Old Mrs. Karafilis knew, been dying for years.

Within the substandard construction of the Charlevoix church, literally upon a shaky foundation, I was baptized into the Orthodox faith; a faith that had existed long before Protestantism had anything to protest and before Catholicism called itself catholic; a faith that stretched back to the beginnings of Christianity, when it was Greek and not Latin, and which, without an Aquinas to reify it, had remained shrouded in the smoke of tradition and mystery whence it began.

Now I’ve given up any hope of lasting fame or literary perfection. I don’t care if I write a great book anymore, but just one which, whatever its flaws, will leave a record of my impossible life.

If you grew up in a house where you weren’t loved, you didn’t know there was an alternative.

He knew a lot about his grandparents – and perhaps he feels he’s been endowed with abilities to go into people’s heads who are long dead – but, to a certain extent, he’s making it up.

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.

When I’m creating a character, it’s a little bit like what my theater teachers used to tell me about Stanislavsky, like if you’re using sense memory to do a scene – if you have to cry in a scene, you try to remember something in your life that made you cry and you use that in order to get the tears.

Parents are supposed to pass down physical traits to their children, but it’s my belief that all sorts of other things get passed down, too: motifs, scenarios, even fates.