Quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides

After four years at college, nobody was anybody she knew.

To feel so much was its own justification.

He tried to imagine what it had been like to be Hemingway, in Paris, in the 1920s. To write those clear, seemingly unadorned, yet complex sentences that would change forever the way Americans wrote prose. To do all that and then go out to dinner where you knew how to order the perfect seasonal wine to go with your huîtres. To be an American in Paris back when it was O.K. to be American.

For a long time the gods had been in close contact with humanity. Then they became disgusted, or discouraged, and they removed themselves. But maybe they would come back again, approach the stray soul who was still curious.

Corpul ii era ca o tulpina, sustinand laleaua creierului sau.

What was it about crazy people that made you want to shun them? The futility of reasoning with them, certainly, but also something else, something like a fear of contagion.

Saying their names seemed to calm him, as though he were uttering incantations: lorazepam, diazepam, chlorpromazine, chlordiazepoxide, haloperidol.

Though she carried on few extended conversations, we got an idea of her state of mind from the little that got back to us of the little she said.

She'd always been a failed bohemian, anyway.

And the artists were the worst, the painters and the writers, because they believed they were living for art when they were really feeding their narcissism.

There was something enjoyable about wandering around the city alone, feeling forlorn.

My mother pictured a daughter as a counterinsurgent: a fellow lover of lapdogs, a seconder of proposals to attend the Ice Capades. In

Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy that he was controlling, that this had been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so involved with operating the dummy that he, the ventriloquist, had ceased to have a personality, becoming just an arm stuffed up the puppet's back.

It's a kind of fugue state, anyway, early sex.

Hearing a beautiful music in her head, she hadn't listened to anything anyone else was saying.

It was possible to feel superior to other people and like a misfit at the same time.

Ma már nem érdekel az örökké tartó hírnév, és az se, hogy tökéletes könyvet írjak. Megelégszem azzal, ha csak emléket állít képtelen életemnek.

It had already crossed her mind that the swimming pool might invite oblivion.

Continuu sa cred ca aceste semne negre facute pe hartia alba poarta cea mai adanca semnificatie, ca daca o tin tot asa cu scrisul, as putea reusi sa prind curcubeul constiintei intr-un borcan.

She didn't know if his perfectionism canceled out his loss of ambition, or if they were two sides of the same coin. When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.

Real life doesn't live up to writing about it

The heat precedes the fire.

All I know is this: despite my androgenized brain, there's an innate feminine circularity in the story I have to tell. In any genetic history. I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you have to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

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