Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Think
Knew
Thinking
Open
Lisbon
Forever
Jumping
Clear
Shut
Else
Remembered
Stills
Suicide
Still
Window
Ever
Close

More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

Image
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
Image
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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
Image
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
Image
But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
They're just memories now. Time to write them off.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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
Image
That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
Being a writer is a solitary life. So the little part of me that's an actor still enjoys the theatrical part of reading and doing the voices and telling the story.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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
Image
I was unemployable when I got out of college.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
If I write a character, instead of looking from the outside, like maybe a journalist would, trying to describe them physically and figuring out what kind of things they might be interested in or have in their house, I don't really do it that way. I try to feel what it would be like to be inside this person, to be them.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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