Quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides

He didn't understand how she had bewitched him, nor why having done so she promptly forgot his existence, and in desperate moods he asked his mirror why the only girl he was crazy about was the only girl not crazy about him.

Adolescents tend to seek love where they can find it.

When asked why she had tried to kill herself, she said only, It was a mistake.

Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.

our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

between addiction and depression? Depression a lot worse. Depression ain't something you just get OFF of. You can't get CLEAN from depression. Depression be like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your MIND. You just got to be careful not to touch where it hurts. It always be there, though.

I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of a shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public.

Two things mania did were to keep you up all night and to enable nonstop sex: pretty much the definition of college.

To be inclusive you must accommodate different levels of sophistication.

Even the air seemed on fire, subtly aflame with energy as it does when you are young, when the synapses are firing wildly and death is far away.

Great discoveries, whether of silk or gravity, are always windfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees.

Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.

Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.

That's how people live, by telling stories. What's the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? "Tell me a story." That's how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.

It seemed like we were supposed to feel sorry for everything that ever happened, ever.

Three times a day Petrovich showed up at the nurse's office for his injections, always using the hypodermic needle himself like the most craven of junkies, though after shooting up he would play the concert piano in the auditorium with astounding artistry, as though insulin were the elixir of genius.

She was the still point in the turning world.

It was as if, before she`d met him, her blood had circulated grayly around her body, and now ir was all oxygenated and red. She was petrified of becoming the half-alive person she`d been before.

What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.

The worst part was that, as the years passed, these memories became, in the way you kept them in a secret box in your head, taking them out every so often to turn them over and over, something like dear possessions. They were the key to your unhappiness. They were the evidence that life wasn't fair. If you weren't a lucky child, you didn't know you weren't lucky until you got older. And then it was all you ever thought about.

Once you've visited the underworld, you never forget the way back.

Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he'd learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents' fighting: his laziness, his overachieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism.

This, Tolstoy says, is our human predicament: we're the man clutching the branch. Death awaits us. There is no escape. And so we distract ourselves by licking whatever drops of honey come within our reach.

Phyllida's hair was where her power resided. It was expensively set into a smooth dome, like a band shell for the presentation of that long-running act, her face.