504 Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

Pregnancy made her feel too much like an animal. It was embarrassing to be so publicly colonized.

I was aware that you weren’t supposed to write about suburbia, that it was undignified in some way, the subject matter not momentous enough. And so, for a long time, that kept me from writing about it. But once I began, I realized it was just as interesting as anywhere else.

I’d like to have a word for ‘the sadness inspired by failing restaurants’ as well as for ’the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.

It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the Giulia blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water.

Up until recently, Milton thought of Tessie as his prim cousin. Whenever one of his friends expressed interest in her, Milton told them to give up the idea. “That’s honey from the icebox,” he said, As Artie Shaw might have. “Cold sweets don’t spread.

There was nowhere I could go that wouldn’t be you.

Somebody out of touch with reality, when she jumped she probably thought she’d fly.

They lined you up in kindergarten, alphabetically. On fourth-grade field trips you took your partner’s hand to push past the musk ox or the steam turbine. School was a perpetual lineup, ending in this final one.

I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn’t normal. It couldn’t be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people-and especially doctors- had doubts about normality. They weren’t sure normality was up the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.