Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Boys
Detroit
Born
August
Teenage
Girl
Twice
Remarkably
Firsts
Near
Emergency
First
Baby
Michigan
Room
January
Rooms
Emergencies
More quotes by 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
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
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
There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, Stay there. Don't move.
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
People don't save other people. People save themselves.
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
that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep
Jeffrey Eugenides
She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.
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
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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.
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
She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.
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
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
I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.
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
