Quote

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

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Country
Countries
Oddly
Like
Couldn
Puzzle
Pieces
Remained
Name
Puzzles
Names
Shaped
Ends
Surrounded
Together
Gaps
Matter
Emptiness
Mapped

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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.
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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.
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Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been my experience.
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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.
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We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in.
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The Pulitzer Prize is an idea it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
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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.
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She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.
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We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.
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They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.
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We knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other.
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and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world
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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.
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She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.
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College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.
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Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.
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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.
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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.
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