Quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides

As they were walking, a beggar came up, holding his hand out and crying, Baksheesh! Baksheesh! Mike kept on going but Mitchell stopped. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out twenty paise and placed it in the beggar's dirty hand. Mike said, I used to give to beggars when I first came here. But then I realized, it's hopeless. It never stops. Jesus said you should give to whoever asks you, Mitchell said. Yeah, well, Mike said, obviously Jesus was never in Calcutta.

Her head appears to be on fire but that is only a trick of the light. It was June 13, eighty-three degrees out, under sunny skies.

I am living through days as happy as those God keeps for his chosen people; and whatever becomes of me, I can never say that I have not tasted the purest joys of life.

We had rarely seen our fathers in work boots before, toiling in the earth and wielding brand-new root clippers. They struggled with the fence, bent over like Marines hoisting the flag on Iwo Jima. It was the greatest show of common effort we could remember in our neighborhood, all those lawyers, doctors, and mortgage bankers locked arm in arm in the trench, with our mothers bringing out orange Kool-Aid, and for a moment our century was noble again.

and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive.

It was as if her own heart had been surgically removed from her body and was being kept at a remote location, still connected to her and pumping blood through her veins, but exposed to dangers she couldn't see: her heart in a box somewhere, in the open air, unprotected.

Dr. Philbosian smelled like an old couch, of hair oil and spilled soup, of unscheduled naps.

Her tragedy hadn't made her more approachable, and in fact lent her the unknowable quality of a person who had suffered more than could be expressed.

Tessie allowed Milton to press his clarinet to her skin and fill her body with music. At first it only tickled her. But after a while the notes spread deeper into her body. She felt the vibrations penetrate her muscles, pulsing in waves, until they rattled her bones and made her inner organs hum.

Aphrodite put off her famous belt, in which all the charms of love are woven, potency, desire, lovely whispers, and the force of seduction, which takes away foresight and judgment even from the most reasonable people.

Just when she'd got her head on straight, her body started falling apart.

In the Orthodox Church, we don't go for partial immersion; no sprinkling, no forehead dabbing for us. In order to be reborn, you have to be buried first, so under the water I went.

It might not even be that great to marry your ideal. Probably, once you attained your ideal, you got bored and wanted another.

She had just started living like a grown-up and she'd never felt more vulnerable, frightened or confused in her life.

She didn't want to be liberated from her emotions, but to have their importance confirmed.

Though some of us saw Lux as a force of nature, impervious to chill, an ice goddess generated by the season itself, the majority knew she was only a girl in danger, or in pursuit, of catching her death of cold.

Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities. Jimmy Zizmo, crouching over the Packard's wheel has already changed past understanding.

When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full posession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims-- these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.

But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.

I never know what I feel until it's too late.

There was nowhere to go that wouldn't be me.

Sixty trillion years ago a god-scientist dug a hole through the earth, filled it with dynamite and blew the earth in two. The smaller of these two pieces became the moon.

It is perhaps in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer.

Fin da piccole sapevano quanto poco valore il mondo attribuisse ai libri, e non perdevano tempo a leggerli. Mentre io, anche adesso, continuo a credere che quei puntini neri su fondo bianco abbiano il più alto dei significati, che se insisto a scrivere potrò cogliere l'arcobaleno della coscienza e rinchiuderlo in un barattolo.