Quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides

When Annie flirted she didn't always admit to herself that she was flirting. Sometimes she preferred to suspend her mental faculties so that she could flirt, as it were, without her mind watching. It was as if her body and mind separated, her body stepping behind a screen to remove its clothing while her mind, on the other side of the screen, paid no attention.".

Behind her freckles, a blush rose to the Object's face. She was, of course, transfixed by such information. I was speaking into her left ear. The blush spread across her face from that side, as if my words left a visible trace.

Part of coming from old money, apparently, was having old-person habits, those gross, adult needs and desperate palliatives. The Object was still too young for the effects to tell on her. She didn't have eye bags yet or stained fingernails. But the appetite for sophisticated ruin was already there. She smelled like smoke, if you got close. Her stomach was a mess. But her face continued to give off its autumnal display.

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

I was aware only of what a strange thing it was to be male. Society discriminated against women, no question. But what about the discrimination of being sent to war? Which sex was really thought to be expendable?

I was extracted, spanked, and hosed off, in that order. They wrapped me in a blanket and put me on display among six other infants, four boys, two girls, all of them, unlike me, correctly tagged. This can't be true but I remember it: sparks slowly filling a dark screen. Someone had switched on my eyes.

More and more, people forgot about the individual reasons why the girls may have killed themselves, the stress disorders and insufficient neurotransmitters, and instead put the deaths down to the girls' foresight in predicting decadence.

A few of us grew brave enough to insert our legs between theirs and to press our agony against them.

the melancholic remainder of our lives (a place the Lisbon girls, wisely, it began to seem, never cared to see)

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.

Ilyenek a férfiak. Úgy mutatják ki az érzelmeiket, hogy rád telepszenek, akár a koporsófedél. És még ezt hívják szerelemnek.

She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand

Apesar de todos os cuidados e reclamações sobre ervas daninhas, eles não davam a mínima para os gramados.

And of course there was the sheer physical fact of her, the blood-tinged blade that she was, the riot of color that caught everyone's attention.

A tragédia se tornou difusa e universalizada.

Inertes exceto quando removidos, batiam as asas com fúria entre nossos dedos e então voavam para se agarrar novamente a qualquer coisa, inertes outra vez

Nosso único legado seria a deserção.

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead.

In the end we had 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.

Her suicide, from this perspective, was seen as a kind of disease infecting those close at hand. In the bathtub, cooking in the broth of her own blood, Cecilia had released an aiborne virus which the other girls, even in coming to save her, had contracted.

But maybe the Charm Bracelets understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.

It had to do with the way the mail wasn't delivered on time, and how potholes never got fixed, or the thievery at City Hall, or the race riots, or the 801 fires set around the city on Devil's night. The Lisbon girls became a symbol of what was wrong with the country, the pain it inflicted on even its most innocent citizens, and in order to make things better a parents' group donated a bench in the girls' memory to our school.

Callie rises up inside me, wearing my skin like a loose robe. She sticks her little hands into the baggy sleeves of my arms. She inserts her chimp's feet through the trousers of my legs. On the sidewalk I'll feel her girlish walk take over, and the movement brings back a kind of emotion, a desolate and gossipy sympathy for the girls I see coming home from school.

We passed the sticky receiver from ear to ear, the drumbeats so regular we might have been pressing our ears to the girls' chests