110+ Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes On Nature, Being And Order

Jeffrey Eugenides is an American novelist best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex. He is also the author of The Virgin Suicides and The Marriage Plot. He is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides on love, life, nature.

Top 10 Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

1. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
2. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
3. When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.
4. Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly
5. It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.
6. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.
7. Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.
8. It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.
9. She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.
10. our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Jeffrey Eugenides Short Quotes

• There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.
• The trees like lungs filling with air. My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair.
• The zipper opened all the way down our spines.
• It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.
• Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.
• To be inclusive you must accommodate different levels of sophistication.
• and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world
• All wisdom ends in paradox.
• You don't understand me. I'm a teenager. I've got problems!
• Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.

Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes About Love

The lover`s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn`t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, the most solitary of places. — Jeffrey Eugenides

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read. — Jeffrey Eugenides

At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling. — Jeffrey Eugenides

If you grew up in a house where you weren't loved, you didn't know there was an alternative. — Jeffrey Eugenides

You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight of her made you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you knew who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences. That was the hope. — Jeffrey Eugenides

He remained heartbroken, which meant one of two things: either his love was pure and true and earthshakingly significant; or he was addicted to feeling forlorn, he liked being heartbroken. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century. — Jeffrey Eugenides

-Who are you, anyway? -Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them. — 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. — Jeffrey Eugenides

When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes About Life

What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. — Jeffrey Eugenides

What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets." (...) "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl. — Jeffrey Eugenides

In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Don't waste your time on life. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I don’t know what you’re feeling, I won’t even pretend — Jeffrey Eugenides

Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life. — Jeffrey Eugenides

In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable. — Jeffrey Eugenides

One of the reasons that art is important to me is sometimes it actually feels more coherent than life. It orders the chaos. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I want an ending that’s satisfying. I’m more of a classical writer than a modernist one in that I want the ending to be coherent and feel like an ending. I don’t like when it just seems to putter out. I mean, life is chaotic enough. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes About Nature

In the midst of my skeptical, cynical, often pessimistic nature exists a slender capacity to believe, if only temporarily, in a guiding, unseen power, and whenever this happens, I go with it. That's what inspiration is. You don't get it from the gods. You make it. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Pregnancy humbles husbands. After an initial rush of male pride they quickly recognise the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Grief is natural,' she said. 'Overcoming it is a matter of choice. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes About Emotional

The ideas for my books come about in two ways. There can be an intellectual idea that seems to be the reason for writing the book. [...] The other motive is unconscious. There is something deeply psychological and emotional that draws me to the material in the first place. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness", "joy", or "regret". Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes About Book

I had a briefcase at one point, but it was a kind of 1980s New Wave briefcase. It was made of some kind of cardboard and it had metal hinges. It was kind of faux industrial looking, and I used to carry my books in it rather than a backpack. I didn't want to have normal student accoutrements. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The book has many different characteristics: some are extremely old-fashioned storytelling traits, but there are also a fair number of postmodern traits, and the self-consciousness is one. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are. — Jeffrey Eugenides

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it. — Jeffrey Eugenides

She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself. — Jeffrey Eugenides

There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things. — Jeffrey Eugenides

To start with, look at all the books. — Jeffrey Eugenides

It wasn't conscious, but I guess that one book is the reaction to the other. The first is so imprisoned in a male point-of-view, and the second is a point-of-view that can go anywhere it wants. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I know that attaching memories to books may be going out of the world, but while it lasts, it's a strong record of your life. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes About Extent

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. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I think it is important to remind people of the extent of our free will. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Mitchell had answered that, as far as he understood them, mystical experiences were significant only to the extent that they changed a person's conception of reality, and if that changed conception led to a change in behavior and action, a loss of ego. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides Famous Quotes And Sayings

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own. — Jeffrey Eugenides

She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside. — Jeffrey Eugenides

We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm. — Jeffrey Eugenides

In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I have a lot of novels that I haven't finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it's not going anywhere. I don't publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Three times a day Petrovich showed up at the nurse's office for his injections, always using the hypodermic needle himself like the most craven of junkies, though after shooting up he would play the concert piano in the auditorium with astounding artistry, as though insulin were the elixir of genius. — Jeffrey Eugenides

There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said that the original human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That's why everybody's always searching for their other half. Except for us. We've got both halves already. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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. — Jeffrey Eugenides

That’s how people live, by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? “Tell me a story.” That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age. — Jeffrey Eugenides

We're all well-acquainted with depression, we all know what the low moods are, but the mania was not something I knew much about. I didn't know that it would make someone dress extravagantly or start to pun, and to stay up and drink. — Jeffrey Eugenides

On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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. — Jeffrey Eugenides

We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it--that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.” -Mrs. Karafilis — Jeffrey Eugenides

We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he'd learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents' fighting: his laziness, his overachieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced. — Jeffrey Eugenides

During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water. — Jeffrey Eugenides

it's amazing what you can get used to. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us. — Jeffrey Eugenides

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope. — Jeffrey Eugenides

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind. — Jeffrey Eugenides

It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Every novelist should possess a hermaphroditic imagination. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The humming of my parents' voices from behind my bedroom wall, which throughout my childhood had filled me with a sense of security, had now become a source of anxiety and panic. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Remember that day you said you loved me? Remember that? See, you could do that because you're basically a sane person, who grew up in a loving, sane family. You could take a risk like that. But in my family we didn't go around saying we loved each other. We went around screaming at each other. So what do I do, when you say you love me? I go and undermine it. — Jeffrey Eugenides

She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I remember liking to write stories pretty early on. In fourth or fifth grade, they would give us the beginning of a story, and we were supposed to finish it. I remember liking that. But I didn't think about deciding to become a writer until high school at about the age of 16. — Jeffrey Eugenides

You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I have a very beautiful room in my house... It's glass on three sides, and you'd think that's the perfect place to write. Somehow in that nice room I feel too exposed, and... I'm too distracted by things going on, so I end up writing in a not-very-nice office bedroom. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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

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

If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Words, words, word. Once, I had the gift. I could make love out of words as a potter makes cups of clay. Love that overthrows empire. Love that binds two hearts together, come hellfire & brimstone. For sixpence a line, I could cause a riot in a nunnery. But now -- I have lost my gift. It's as if my quill is broken, as if the organ of my imagination has dried up, as if the proud -illegible word- of my genius has collapsed. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The worst thing about religion was religious people. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I was unemployable when I got out of college. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The window was still open.” Mr Lisbon said. “I don’t think we’d ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close it or else she’d go on jumping out of it forever — Jeffrey Eugenides

All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and one, who went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her collarbones collected water. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Lux spent the ride dialing the radio for her favorite song. "It makes me crazy," she said. "You know they're playing it somewhere, but you have to find it. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye. — Jeffrey Eugenides

They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us. — Jeffrey Eugenides

And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Withen 5 minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? Your not even old enough to know how bad life gets." And it was then Cecelia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a 13 year old girl. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I saw the movie, he said. I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so - he leaned toward us - their tits bleed. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily. — Jeffrey Eugenides

She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I think there's a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to do with the method acting that I was taught in high school and college. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Well, marriage doesn't function in the way it used to in terms of deciding our fate, but it's in our heads, and it determines a lot of our actions. Like, right now, if you think about gay marriage - and they just started having the first gay marriages in New York - it shows what a potent idea marriage remains for people. — Jeffrey Eugenides

She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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. — Jeffrey Eugenides

girls forbidden to dance would only attract husbands with bad complexions and sunken chests. — Jeffrey Eugenides

But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I wanted to be an actor. My parents were not too keen on that. — Jeffrey Eugenides

They thought depression was like bieng 'depressed'. They thought it was like being in a bad mood, only worse. Therefore, they tried to get him to snap out of it. — Jeffrey Eugenides

It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time. — Jeffrey Eugenides

What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn't like? — Jeffrey Eugenides

Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Their desire was silent yet magnificent, like a thousand daisies attuning their faces toward the path of the sun. — Jeffrey Eugenides

She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Life Lessons by Jeffrey Eugenides

1. Jeffrey Eugenides teaches us that the power of literature lies in its ability to explore complex human emotions and relationships.
2. He also encourages us to think critically about the world around us, and to consider the impact of our decisions on those around us.
3. Lastly, he reminds us that no matter how difficult life can be, there is always hope and beauty to be found in the world.