Quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides

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.

The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.

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.

That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.

The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.

So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in.

The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.

If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.

Detroit's a great music town. If your interaction with it was mainly musical, I'm sure you have a good opinion of the place.

This was a characteroloical prelude, but it wasn't chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.

There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.

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.

The Pulitzer isn't a physical object. You can't hold it in your hand. You get some money ($7,500 in my day), and you get a little Tiffany's paperweight with your name on it and the image of Joseph Pulitzer suspended in the crystal. When people see my 'Pulitzer' (I keep it in my sock drawer), they are pretty amazed at its meagerness.

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.

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.

The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before, and the pleasure you get from writing - rare but profound - remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.

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.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

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.

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly

It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.

In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.