Quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides

We stood silent. After a moment I said, Real Geniuses never think they're geniuses. Who says? Me. Because why? Because genius is nine-tenths perspiration. Haven't you ever heard that? As soon as you think you're a genius, you slack off. You think everything you do is so great and everything.

They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived—bound, in other words, for life.

But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant

It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.

But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.

The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.

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.

Though at this moment she felt abused, abandoned, and ashamed of herself, Madeleine knew that she was still young, that she had her whole life ahead of her--a life in which, if she persevered, she might do something special--and that part of persevering meant getting past moments just like this one, when people made you feel small, unlovable, and took away your confidence.

Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.

She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.

The window was still open," Mr Lisbon said. "I don't think we'd ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close that window or else she'd go on jumping out of it forever.

With most people suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The two other bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty.

There were some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.

All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and one, who went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her collarbones collected water.

Lux spent the ride dialing the radio for her favorite song. It makes me crazy, she said. You know they're playing it somewhere, but you have to find it.

There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said that the original human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That's why everybody's always searching for their other half. Except for us. We've got both halves already.

The window gave onto a view of dove-gray roofs and balconies, each one containing the same cracked flowerpot and sleeping feline. It was as if the entire city of Paris had agreed to abide by a single understated taste. Each neighbor was doing his or her own to keep up standards, which was difficult because the French ideal wasn't clearly delineated like the neatness and greenness of American lawns, but more of a picturesque disrepair. It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.

It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.

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

We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.

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?

We Greeks get married in circles, to impress upon ourselves the essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back where you began.

Pregnancy humbles husbands. After an initial rush of male pride they quickly recognise the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction.

And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.