Quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides

He remained heartbroken, which meant one of two things: either his love was pure and true and earthshakingly significant; or he was addicted to feeling forlorn, he liked being heartbroken.

no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.

Every letter was a love letter.

I have a very beautiful room that in my house that we bought in Princeton. It's glass on three sides, and you'd think that's the perfect place to write. Somehow in that nice room I feel too exposed, and I can notice I'm too distracted by things going on, so I end up writing in a not-very-nice office bedroom.

Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you.

A few years ago in Chicago, I rented an office, and I went there every day. For the most part I do work at home in an ugly room.

I have a lot of novels that I haven't finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it's not going anywhere. I don't publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.

We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.

Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.

Sourmelina's secret (as Aunt Zo put it): 'Lina was one of those women they named the island after.

I was engrossed with the book, I was having difficulties with it, and I just didn't notice the years were going by.

I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.

I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.

Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.

I'm aware of cliches and I'm aware of experiments that have been done and I'm aware of a kind of deadness to a lot of realism both in the language and in the structure of a book.

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.

She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.

We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...

She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.

Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

People don't save other people. People save themselves.

During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.