Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

“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, The Virgin Suicides

“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.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“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.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“They had killed themselves over the failure to find a love that none of us could ever be.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“One thing I learned, between addiction and depression? Depression a lot worse. Depression ain't something you just get off of. You can't get clean from depression. Depression be like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch where it hurts. It always be there, though.
Darlene, in The Marriage Plot”
― Jeffrey Eugenides

“And it was during this period that Madeleine fully understood how 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

“And he rose, brontosaurus-like, to his place among the treetops.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls. Our parents thought it had to do with our music, our godlessness, or the loosening of morals regarding sex we hadn't even had.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Постепенно умът му стана също толкова фрагментарен, колкото поемите на Сафо, които така и не успя да възстанови, и накрая една сутрин погледна лицето на жената, която беше обичал повече от всичко, и не я позна. В този миг преживя трети удар; кръвта нахлу в мозъка му за последен път, отмивайки и последните фрагменти от неговата личност.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable, and she thought when Dominic heard about it, on the highway, amid the cactus, he would realize that it was she who loved him.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“It occurred to us that she and the girls read secret signs of misery in cloud formations, that despite the discrepancies in their ages something timeless communicated itself between them, as though she were advising the girls in her mumbling Greek, "Don't waste your time on life.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Though she carried on few extended conversations, we got an idea of her state of mind from the little that got back to us of the little she said.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“She was the still point of the turning world.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides/T.S. Eliot

“I ask you: is dullness a gift? Intelligence a curse? I'm fort-seven years old and live alone.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides

“I ask you: is dullness a gift? Intelligence a curse? I'm forty-seven years old and live alone.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, (The Virgin Suicides) [By: Eugenides, Jeffrey] [Jun, 2013]