Quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides

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. As

Sure. Martinis. We can pretend we're Salinger characters.

We were reckless with the implications

all the clamorous Xeroxes whose subtext conveyed the message that the wholesome, patriotic values of her parents' generation were now on the ash heap of history, replaced by a nihilistic, post-punk sensibility that Madeleine herself didn't understand but was perfectly happy to scandalize her parents by pretending that she did—before the elevator stopped in the lobby and she slid open the gate and stepped out to meet them.

And it was during this period that Madeleine fully understood how the lover's discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn't physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, that most solitary of places.

The most widely raised type of silkworm, the larva of the 'Bombyx mori', no longer exists anywhere in a natural state. As my encyclopedia poignantly puts it: 'The legs of the larvae have degenerated, and the adults no longer fly'.

Children were only strangers you agreed to live with

The notion made us dizzy, and we lay down on the Larsons' carpet, which smelled of pet deodorizer and, deeper down, of pet.

It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.

he saw neither teacher nor students, and was aware only of the heavenly light in the room, an orange glow from the autumnal foliage outside. the room seemed full of a sweet viscous liquid, a honey nearly light as air, which he breathed in.

Everyone in the room was so spectral-looking that Madeleine's natural healthiness seemed suspect, like a vote for Reagan.

What's the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? 'Tell me a story.' That's how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything. [179]

He explained that he had arrived at college without knowing much about religion, and how, from reading English literature, he'd begun to realize how ignorant he was. The world had been formed by beliefs he knew nothing about. 'That was the beginning,' he said, 'realizing how stupid I was.

As soon as the cry reached my father, however, he marched into the kitchen to tell his mother that, this time at least, her spoon was wrong. "And how you know so much?" Desdemona asked him. To which he replied what many Americans of his generation would have: "It's science, Ma.

She had the rectitude, Joe Hill Conley later said, of someone who had just come from weeping in the next room.

I ask you: is dullness a gift? Intelligence a curse? I'm fort-seven years old and live alone.

Every second is eternal

Mr. Lisbon continued to go to work in the mornings and the family continued to attend church on Sundays, but that was it. The house receded behind its mists of youth being choked off

Drunk, and kissing us, or passing out in chairs, they were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.

The sun had fallen below the horizon, but still lit the sky in an orange chemical streak more beautiful than nature.

We went outside with our hair wet in the hopes of catching flu ourselves so that we might share their delirium.

asceticism or starvation

Per essere felici bisogna trovare varietà nella ripetizione.

Hardly have we begun to palpate their grief than we find ourselves wondering whether this particular wound was mortal or not, or whether (in our blind doctoring) it's a wound at all. It might just as well be a mouth, which is as wet and as warm.