Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Jeffrey Eugenides quote about:
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“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“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 -
“She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“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 -
“When I think back about my immediate reaction to that redheads girl, it seems to spring from an appreciation of natural beauty. I mean the heart pleasure you get from looking at speckled leaves or the palimpsested bark of plane trees in Provence. There was something richly appealing to her color combination, the ginger snaps floating in the milk-white skin, the golden highlights in the strawberry hair. it was like autumn, looking at her. It was like driving up north to see the colors.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down. You won’t have to explain things that don’t need explaining. You’ll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don’t wish to be condescended to.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“I don’t know what you’re feeling, I won’t even pretend”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“In the midst of my skeptical, cynical, often pessimistic nature exists a slender capacity to believe, if only temporarily, in a guiding, unseen power, and whenever this happens, I go with it. That's what inspiration is. You don't get it from the gods. You make it.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“He knew a lot about his grandparents - and perhaps he feels he's been endowed with abilities to go into people's heads who are long dead - but, to a certain extent, he's making it up.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“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 -
“Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... 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." I've never had the right words to describe my life...”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“The time has to be right and the heart willing.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides -
“I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.”
-- Jeffrey Eugenides
