Quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides

Lux's frequent forged excuses from phys. ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t 's and b 's of her mother's signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L 's reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x .

My goal in life is to become an adjective, Leonard said. People would go around saying, 'That was so Bankheadian.' Or, 'A little too Bankheadian for my taste.

He hadn't suffered the eternity of the ring about to be picked up, didn't know the heart rush of hearing that incomparable voice suddenly linked with his own, the sense it gave of being too close to even see her, of being actually inside her ear.

She leaned toward him and said in a quiet voice, Are you Christian? Mitchell hesitated to answer. The worst thing about religion was religious people.

When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls' emotional state at that point, he said, Buffeted but not broken.

They were moving along like that, each cupping a hold of the other. 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 beautiful and fortunate, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.

Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

Where else would she feel more comfortable than in this subterranean realm where people wrote down what they couldn't say, where they gave voice to their most shameful longings and knowledge?

Even our parents seemed to agree more and more with the television version of things, listening to the reporters' inanities as though they could tell us the truth about our own lives.

Eating is natural. Gaining weight is your choice.

The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.

Aloft, he looked frail, diseased, and temperamental, as we expected a European to look.

She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she`d remember the brutal fact that had caused it.

Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. 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 show how intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members connects with the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.

In those days you could identify a person's nationality by smell. Lying on her back with eyes closed, Desdemona could detect the telltale oniony aroma of a Hungarian woman on her right, and the raw-meat smell of an Armenian on her left. (And they, in turn, could peg Desdemona as a Hellene by her aroma of garlic and yogurt.)

This whole country's stolen.

A girl's not a watermelon you plug a hole in to see if it's sweet.

every now and then he would tilt his head back so that his sunglasses reflected sky, and would say, I love her. Every time he said it he seemed delivered of a profundity that amazed him, as though he had coughed up a pearl.

His lost look of a man who realized that all this dying was going to be the only life he ever had.

The last thing the hockey ball symbolized was Time itself, the unstoppability of it, the way we're chained to our bodies, which are chained to Time.

Pregnancy made her feel too much like an animal. It was embarrassing to be so publicly colonized.

Mitchell had answered that, as far as he understood them, mystical experiences were significant only to the extent that they changed a person's conception of reality, and if that changed conception led to a change in behavior and action, a loss of ego.

At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with, and he reached out in order to meet her for the first time.

no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.