504 Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

Some people need a picture. Any great religion has to be inclusive. And to be inclusive you have to accommodate different levels of sophistication.

I’m the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

We had rarely seen our fathers in work boots before, toiling in the earth and wielding brand-new root clippers. They struggled with the fence, bent over like Marines hoisting the flag on Iwo Jima. It was the greatest show of common effort we could remember in our neighborhood, all those lawyers, doctors, and mortgage bankers locked arm in arm in the trench, with our mothers bringing out orange Kool-Aid, and for a moment our century was noble again.

That was when I realized a shocking thing. I couldn’t become a man without becoming The Man. Even if I didn’t want to.

Stomach-sleepers like me were in retreat from reality, given to dark perception and the meditative arts. This.

I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I’m writing about women, I think I’m writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.

That was the ideal: to remain dutiful to a preservationist ethos while not depriving yourself of modern creature comforts.

But I care about the reader, and I’m trying to keep the reader’s attention for as long as I can.

It is wonderful barefoot in New York. It is like walking on one big giant tomb!