Quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides

We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.

Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets." And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.

In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.

I don't know what you're feeling. I won't even pretend.

Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.

They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.

Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.

You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.

There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.

That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.

The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.

I mean, when I got to Brown, the place was riven, because you had older professors who were basically new critics and had been teaching a certain way for 30 years. And then you had this other gang who was down with the semiotic program. And as a student, you were, in a way, forced to choose which cohort you were going with.

We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly

There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.

What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets." (...) "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.