Quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides

she and the girls read secret signs of misery in cloud formations, that despite the discrepancy in their ages something timeless communicated itself between them

what really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death

Becoming a person, of course, means finding your people, and your place among them

People felt they owned the trees. Their dogs had marked them daily. Their children had used them for home plate. The trees had been there when they'd moved in, and had promised to be there when they moved out. But when the Parks Department came to cut them down, it was clear our trees were not ours but the city's. to do with as it wished.

Emotion, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in sadness, joy, or regret. Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, the happiness that attends disaster. ...most of my emotions are hybrids. But not all. Some are pure and unadulterated. Jealousy, for instance.

Thinking back, we decided the girls had been trying to talk to us all along, to elicit our help, but we had been to infatuated to see it.

At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with, and he reached out in order to meet her for the first time.

The swamp smell that arose was outrageous amid the genteel mansions of the automotive families and the green elevated paddle tennis courts and the graduation parties held under illuminated tents. Debutantes cried over the misfortune of coming out in a season everyone would remember for its bad smell. The O'Connors. however, came up with ingenious solution of making the theme of their daughter Alice's debutante party Asphyxiation.

We know now that most birth deformities result from the consanguinity of the parents." "From the what?" asked Desdemona. "From families intermarrying." Desdemona went white. "Causes all kinds of problems. Imbecility. Hemophilia. Look at the Romanovs. Look at any royal family. Mutants, all of them.

At the same time, the fact that the girls were slowly sinking hadn't completely penetrated our minds, and on some mornings we awoke to a world still unruptured: we stretched, we got out of bed, and only after rubbing our eyes at the window did we remember the rotting house across the street, and the mossblackened windows hiding the girls from our sight. The truth was this: we were beginning to forget the Lisbon girls, and we could remember nothing else.

Lumea ajunsese la capat. Oriunde m-as fi dus, dadeam tot peste mine.

Cecila was weird, but we're not. And then: We just want to live. If anyone would let us.

The girls were right in choosing to love Trip, because he was the only boy who could keep his mouth shut. By nature Trip Fontaine possessed the discretion of the world's great lovers, seducers greater than Casanova because they didn't leave behind twelve volumes of memoirs and we don't even know who they were.

His beauty had left him without cunning

None of my daughters lacked for any love. We had plenty of love in our house.

our fellow Negro citizens could be summed up in something Tessie said after watching Sidney Poitier's performance in To Sir with Love, which opened a month before the riots. She said, "You see, they can speak perfectly normal if they want.

but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.

Capitalism has resulted in material well-being, but spiritual bankruptcy.

When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly.

It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.

What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn't like?