Quote

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

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
Stories
Ever
Need
Right
Needs
Entered
Never
Describe
Life
Story
Words

More quotes by 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 always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
To start with, look at all the books.
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
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
When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.
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
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
It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.
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
it's amazing what you can get used to.
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
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
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
Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
The zipper opened all the way down our spines.
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
Image
They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.
Jeffrey Eugenides