Quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides

By cutting off my hair I was punishing myself for loving someone so much. I was trying to be stronger.

Their hearts were wrung with anguish, the anguish of having children, a vulnerability as astonishing as the capacity for love that parenthood brings ... [426]

Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable, and she thought when Dominic heard about it, on the highway, amid the cactus, he would realize that it was she who loved him.

You used to be able to tell a person's nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that. Those Finnish seal puppies, those German flounders - you don't see them much anymore. Only Nikes, on Basque, on Dutch, on Siberian feet.

But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant …) Spring

After all the screaming in our house, there reigned, that winter on Middlesex, only silence. A silence so profound that, like the left foot of the President's secretary, it erased portions of the official record.

It occurred to us that she and the girls read secret signs of misery in cloud formations, that despite the discrepancies in their ages something timeless communicated itself between them, as though she were advising the girls in her mumbling Greek, Don't waste your time on life.

I don't want to ruin your life, Leonard said in a gentler tone. You're not ruining it. The drugs just slow the process down. But the end's inevitable. The question is, how to turn this thing off? He jabbed at his head with his index finger. It's cutting me up, and I can't turn it off. Madeleine, listen to me. Listen. I'm not going to get better.

Hogy az emberek miért pont ahhoz kötik az életüket, akikhez aztán kötik, azt többnyire épp az érintettek értik a legkevésbé.

And so a strange new possibility is arising. Compromised, indefinite, sketchy, but not entirely obliterated: free will is making a comeback. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

They lined you up in kindergarten, alphabetically. On fourth-grade field trips you took your partner's hand to push past the musk ox or the steam turbine. School was a perpetual lineup, ending in this final one.

As much as he hated his lithium, here it was his friend. Leonard could feel the huge tide of sadness waiting to rush over him. But there was an invisible barrier keeping the full reality of it from touching him. It was like squeezing a baggie full of water and feeling all the properties of the liquid without getting wet.

because we watched her so closely out of the corners of our eyes, everything she did made too much noise, her cigarette smoke got into everything, she drank too much wine at dinner.

Desdemona oli tottunut näkemään heidän siamilaisvarjonsa iltaisin vasten valkeaksi kalkittua talonseinää, ja aina kohdatessaan vain oman varjonsa hänestä tuntui kuin se olisi halkaistu kahtia.

But it rained all the time, fog covered the fields, and by then he was reading Tolstoy. There were some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things. A Confession was a book like that.

Luce even analyzed my prose style to see if I wrote in a linear, masculine way, or in a circular, feminine one.

Los sueños son para los que duermen, a nosotros nos toca vivir.

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns.

The experience of watching Leonard get better was like reading certain difficult books. It was like plowing through late James, or the pages about agrarian reform in Anna Karenina, until you suddenly got to a good part again, which kept on getting better and better until you were so enthralled that you were almost grateful for the previous dull stretch because it increased your eventual pleasure.

I know what it's like to be high.

As meninas estavam enormes naqueles vestidos de cerimónia, construídos à volta de uma estrutura de arame. Tinham quilos e quilos de cabelo, bem presos, na cabeça. Embriagadas, beijando-nos, ou a desmaiar nas cadeiras, estavam destinadas ao ensino superior, aos maridos, à educação dos filhos, à infelicidade que dificilmente se percebia - enfim, à vida.

It is wonderful barefoot in New York. It is like walking on one big giant tomb!

Psychologists agree that adolescence is much more fraught with pressures and complexities than in years past. Often, in today's world, the extended childhood American life has bestowed on its young turns out to be a wasteland, where the adolescent feels cut off from both childhood and adulthood. Self-expression can often be frustrated. More and more, doctors say, this frustration can lead to acts of violence whose reality the adolescent cannot separate from the intended drama.

Find the Bad Guy means how, when you're arguing with your spouse, both people are trying to win the argument. Who didn't close the garage door? Who left the Bigfoot hair clump in the shower drain? What you have to realize, as a couple, is that there is no bad guy. You can't win an argument when you're married. Because if you win, your spouse loses, and resents losing, and then you lose, too, pretty much.