Quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides

Bármerre menekültem is, mindenütt téged láttalak magam elÅ'tt.

It's a kind of fugue state, anyway, early sex. Before the routine sets in, or the love. Back when the groping is largely anonymous. Sandbox sex. It starts in the teens and lasts until twenty or twenty-one. It's all about learning to share. It's about sharing your toys.

That was in June, fish-fly season, when each year our town is covered bythe flotsam of those ephemeral insects. Rising in clouds from the algae in the polluted lake, they blacken windows, coat cars and street amps,plaster the municipal docks and festoon the rigging of sailboats, always in the same brown ubiquity of flying scum.

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. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time-traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

Lobsters are classified in the phylum Arthropoda, same as insects. They're bugs. And bugs are only lobsters that have learned to fly.

In 1922 there were barely a hundred people living in the village. Fewer than half of those were women. Of forty-seven women, twenty-one were old ladies. Another twenty were middle-aged wives. Three were young mothers, each with a daughter in diapers. One was his sister. That left two marriageable girls. Whom Desdemona now rushed to nominate.

I would handle the deep intellectual matters, like vibrators; she would handle the social sphere.

Desdemona picked the beads up. She began to slip them one by one through her fingers, exactly as her father had done, and her grandfather, and her great-grandfather, performing a family legacy of precise, codified, thorough worrying.

Shall I get right to it? No, slowly, leisurely, that's the way. Let me first mention that it is October here in Germany. 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 boisterously congregated in the striped Strandkörbe, the little beach huts.

plate, nor did Mrs. Bates, who had once wept when we set

Certain "advanced" girls understood. Others, like me, thought: knife wound, bear attack.

At Spichernstrasse the train halted to conduct an exchange of bodies. Out on the platform a street musician played a teary Slavic melody on an accordion. Wing tips gleaming, my hair still damp, I was flipping through the Frankfurter Allgemeine when she rolled her unthinkable bicycle in.

From the beginning I was aware that there was something improper about the way I felt about Clementine Stark, something I shouldn't tell my mother, but I wouldn't have been able to articulate it. I didn't connect this feeling to sex. I didn't know sex existed

Everyone he knew was convinced that religion was a sham and God a fiction. But his friends' replacements for religion didn't look too impressive. No one had an answer for the riddle of existence. It was like that Talking Heads song. 'And you may ask yourself, how did I get here? …And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful wife.

Looking back now, I can only remember a time when the world seemed to have a million eyes, silently opening wherever I went. Most of the time they were camouflaged, like the closed eyes of green lizards in green trees. But then they snapped open—on the bus, in the pharmacy—and I felt the intensity of all that looking, the desire and the desperation.

I did what any loving, loyal daughter would have done who had been raised on a diet of Hercules movies.

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

it was clear, if you looked up, that the earth had turned its blue face away from the sun, that it was sweeping down its own dark alley in space

Derrida is my absolute god!

On the wall of his living room Billy had painted the words 'Kill the Father.' Killing the father was what, in Billy's opinion, college was all about. Who's your father? he asked Madeleine. Is it Virginia Woolf? Is it Sontag? In my case, Madeleine said, my father really is my father. Then you have to kill him. Who's your father?

There's a kind of purity in that, the purity of childhood.

Cecilia appeared in our consciousness at odd moments, most often as we were just waking up, or staring out a car-pool window streaked with rain—she rose up in her wedding dress, muddy with the afterlife, but then a horn would honk, or our radio alarms would unleash a popular song, and we snapped back to reality.

For while my classmates found The Iliad too bloody for their taste, an endless catalogue of men butchering one another after formally introducing themselves, I thrilled to the stabbings and beheadings, the gouging out of eyes, the juicy eviscerations.)

Along with everyone else, I looked up. Standing in the doorway was a redheaded girl. Two clouds bumped up above, skidding past each other, and let down a beam of light. This beam struck the glass roof of the greenhouse. Passing through the hanging geraniums, it picked up the rosy light which now, in a kind of membrane, enveloped the girl. It was also possible that the sun wasn't doing this at all, but a certain intensity, a soul ray, from my eyes.