504 Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.

Her tragedy hadn't made her more approachable, and in fact lent her the unknowable quality of a person who had suffered more than could be expressed.

Phyllida's hair was where her power resided. It was expensively set into a smooth dome, like a band shell for the presentation of that long-running act, her face.

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.

But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant

A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.

Pay no attention to the terrors that visit you in the night. The psyche is at its lowest ebb then, unable to defend itself. The desolation that envelops you feels like truth, but isn't. It's just mental fatigue masquerading as insight.

My mind was curiously blank. It was the blankness of obedience. With the unerring instinct of children, I had surmised what my parents wanted from me. They wanted me to stay the way I was. [434]

Tessie allowed Milton to press his clarinet to her skin and fill her body with music. At first it only tickled her. But after a while the notes spread deeper into her body. She felt the vibrations penetrate her muscles, pulsing in waves, until they rattled her bones and made her inner organs hum.