Quote

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

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
Learn
Speak
Children
Way
French
Male
Males
English
Female

More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

Image
If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.
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
On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
People don't save other people. People save themselves.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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.
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
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
Image
To start with, look at all the books.
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
I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.
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
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
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
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
Image
I had a briefcase at one point, but it was a kind of 1980s New Wave briefcase. It was made of some kind of cardboard and it had metal hinges. It was kind of faux industrial looking, and I used to carry my books in it rather than a backpack. I didn't want to have normal student accoutrements.
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
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
It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.
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
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