Quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides

Who are you, anyway? Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them. I could have sworn we just met, Madeleine said. And that you don't know anything about me. Henry stood up. With a slightly offended air but undiminished confidence, he said, People save themselves. He left her with that to think about.

and you can feel it in the air, they way the air has somehow been keeping score.

Shit. What have kids got to be worried about now? If they want trouble, they should go live in Bangladesh.

She was always saying, 'Fuck this school,' or 'I can't wait until I get out of here.' But so did lots of kids.

This is my country,' Lefty said, and to prove it, he did a very American thing: he reached under the counter and produced a pistol.

Olivia lit a cigarette and said, God, if I worried about running into old boyfriends, I couldn't go anywhere!

Given the choice, a yeast cell's ideal state is to be diploid. But if it's in an environment with a lack of nutrients, you know what happens? The diploids break into haploids again. Solitary little haploids. Because, in a crisis, it's easier to survive as a single cell.

He wanted women to love him, all women, beginning with his mother and going on from there. Therefore, whenever any woman got mad at him, he felt maternal disapproval crashing down upon his shoulders, as if he'd been a naughty boy.

He was filled with embarrassment: embarrassment for the human race, its preoccupation with money, it love of swindle.

They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us.

Then one Sunday morning, before winter break, Abby's boyfriend, Whitney, materialized at their kitchen table, reading something called Of Grammatology. When Madeleine asked what the book was about, she was given to understand by Whitney that the idea of a book being about something was exactly what this book was against, and that, if it was about anything, then it was about the need to stop thinking of books as being about things.

But as I peeked at my brother's inert body....I was aware only of what a strange thing it was to be male. Society discriminated against women, no question. But what about the discrimination of being sent war? Which sex was really thought to be expendable.

I went to church. It didn't help. In those days that was the best place to meet a girlfriend. In church! All of us praying to be different.

The matter with us is you.

Here it comes, I thought. The first ex-boyfriend had been summoned. Soon the rest would follow. They would file around the table, presenting their deficiencies, telling of their addictions, their cheating hearts... But that didn't happen with Julie. This was because Julie isn't husband-hunting. So she didn't have to interview me for the job.

Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them...People don't save other people. People save themselves.

Now I've given up any hope of lasting fame or literary perfection. I don't care if I write a great book anymore, but just one which, whatever its flaws, will leave a record of my impossible life.

Some people need a picture. Any great religion has to be inclusive. And to be inclusive you have to accommodate different levels of sophistication.

They had killed themselves over the failure to find a love that none of us could ever be.

At the time, infatuated with Nietzsche (and half asleep), Leonard didn't want to get into this argument, the truth of which wasn't that all religions were equally valid but that they were equally nonsensical.

She used a line from Trollope's Barchester Towers as an epigraph:There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

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.

Parties bring my misantrophy into focus.

It was like that Talking Head song. "And you may ask yourself, 'How did I get here?' … And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful wife' ". As he responded to the essay questions, Mitchell kept bending his answers toward their practical applications. He wanted to know why he was here, and how to live. It was perfect way to end your college career. Education had finally led Mitchell out into life.