Quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides

The sonogram didn't exist at the time; the spoon was the next best thing.

in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was no less than a guerrilla uprising. The Second American Revolution.

It was convenient to call them snipers, because if they weren't snipers, then what were they? The governor didn't say it; the newspapers didn't say it; the history books still do not say it, but I, who watched the entire thing on my bike, saw it clearly: in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was nothing less than a guerrilla uprising. The Second American Revolution.

There were pencil scrawls and ink stains, dried blood, snack crumbs; and the leather binding itself was secured to the lectern by a chain. Here was a book that contained the collected knowledge of the past while giving evidence of present social conditions...The dictionary contained every word in the English language but the chain knew only a few. It knew thief and steal and, maybe, purloined. The chain spoke of poverty and mistrust and inequality and decadence.

I should also mention, with the vestigial pang of a once flat-chested girl, Desdemona's voluptuous figure.

Who else did they have to turn to? Not their parents. Nor the neighborhood. Inside their house they were prisoners; outside, lepers. And so they hid from the world, waiting for someone—for us—to save them.

Desde temprana edad eran conscientes del escaso valor que el mundo daba a los libros, de manera que no perdían el tiempo con ellos. Mientras que yo, incluso ahora, persisto en creer que esos signos negros trazados en papel blanco son de la mayor importancia, y que si continúo escribiendo lograré atrapar el arco iris de la conciencia y guardarlo en un tarro.

The pains they took to make themselves smooth! The rashes the creams left! The futility of it all! The enemy, hair, was invincible. It was life itself.

Stomach-sleepers like me were in retreat from reality, given to dark perception and the meditative arts. This

Still point of the turning world.

That was when I realized a shocking thing. I couldn't become a man without becoming The Man. Even if I didn't want to.

Out past the weekly glimpsed windows, out past the street, lived the world, which had, Old Mrs. Karafilis knew, been dying for years.

Listening to Leonard, Madeleine felt impoverished by her happy childhood. She never wondered why she acted the way she did, or what effect her parents had had on her personality. Being fortunate had dulled her powers of observation.

We found each other for so long before we lost each other.

One's country is like oneself. The more you learned about it, the more there was to be ashamed of.

And yet sometimes she worried about those musty old books were doing to her. Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists.

It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the Giulia blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water.

There is basic pain in being sentient, in being witness to the phenomenal existence of the world without any answer as to why.

But she had unbuckled us, it turned out, only to stall us, so that she and her sisters could die in peace

that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back where you began.

Whatever happened now would become the truth, that whatever he seemed to be would become what he was - already an American, in other words.

The magisterial presence of all those potentially readable words stopped her in her tracks.

Though the weather was cool, the beach at Herringsdorf was dotted with quite a few diehard nudists. Primarily men, they lay walrus-like on towels or boosterously congregated.

Throughout the act, headlights came on across the field, sweeping over them, lighting up the goal-post. Lux said, in the middle, I always screw things up. I always do and began to sob. Trip Fontaine told us a little more. We asked him if he put her in the cab but he said no. I walked home that night. I didn;t care how she got home. I just took off. Then: It's weird. I mean, I liked her I really liked her. I just got sick of her right then.