504 Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

He was filled with embarrassment: embarrassment for the human race, its preoccupation with money, it love of swindle.

He was like a statue being chiseled away from the inside, hollowed out. As more and more of his thoughts gave him pain, Milton had increasingly avoided them. Instead he concentrated on the few that made him feel better, the bromides about everything working out. Milton, quite simply, had ceased to think things through.

Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking it’s passage for some reason.

I’m hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

A sniper is cowardly, sneaky; he kills from a distance, unseen.

It was as if, before she’d met him, her blood had circulated grayly around her body, and now ir was all oxygenated and red. She was petrified of becoming the half-alive person she’d been before.

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.

Planning is for the world’s great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

She didn’t want to be liberated from her emotions, but to have their importance confirmed.