Quote

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

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
Knew
Corner
Known
Corners
Given
Suddenly
Else
Brought
Matter
Turned
Thing
Became
Something
Birth
Life
Started
Nursed

More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

Image
It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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
Image
You can tell when something's not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don't go away.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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
Image
Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
I was unemployable when I got out of college.
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
During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.
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
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
This can't be true but I remember it.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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
Image
that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides