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

More quotes by 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
I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants' as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
The zipper opened all the way down our spines.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.
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
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
But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
This can't be true but I remember it.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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
Image
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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
Image
She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.
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
I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.
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
Image
On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.
Jeffrey Eugenides