Jeffrey Eugenides
We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.Collection: Half
So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.Collection: Boys
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.Collection: Song
and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the worldCollection: Trying
It was as if, before she`d met him, her blood had circulated grayly around her body, and now ir was all oxygenated and red. She was petrified of becoming the half-alive person she`d been before.Collection: Blood
She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she`d remember the brutal fact that had caused it.Collection: Grief
Their desire was silent yet magnificent, like a thousand daisies attuning their faces toward the path of the sun.Collection: Desire
Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.Collection: Rome
This can't be true but I remember it.Collection: Remember
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.Collection: Fall
I think there's a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to do with the method acting that I was taught in high school and college.Collection: Real
I wanted to be an actor. My parents were not too keen on that.Collection: Parent
Being a writer is a solitary life. So the little part of me that's an actor still enjoys the theatrical part of reading and doing the voices and telling the story.Collection: Reading
She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.Collection: Heart
In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.Collection: Death
Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.Collection: Heartbreak
I don’t know what you’re feeling, I won’t even pretendCollection: Feelings
She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.Collection: Reason
The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.Collection: Facts
Don't waste your time on life.Collection: Waste
Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking it's passage for some reason.Collection: World
The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.Collection: Love Is
Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities.Collection: Ice
We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it--that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.” -Mrs. KarafilisCollection: Daughter
You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight of her made you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you knew who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences. That was the hope.Collection: Girl
We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. 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.Collection: Girl
The worst thing about religion was religious people.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Heartbroken
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, the most solitary of places.Collection: Solitude
You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.Collection: Knowing Nothing
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.Collection: Father
Every novelist should possess a hermaphroditic imagination.Collection: Imagination
When I think back about my immediate reaction to that redheads girl, it seems to spring from an appreciation of natural beauty. I mean the heart pleasure you get from looking at speckled leaves or the palimpsested bark of plane trees in Provence. There was something richly appealing to her color combination, the ginger snaps floating in the milk-white skin, the golden highlights in the strawberry hair. it was like autumn, looking at her. It was like driving up north to see the colors.Collection: Girl
Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.Collection: Believe
It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.Collection: Autumn
She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.Collection: Children
The time has to be right and the heart willing.Collection: Heart
She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.Collection: Book
No matter how long your've been at it, you always start from scratch.Collection: Writing
If you grew up in a house where you weren't loved, you didn't know there was an alternative.Collection: Love
The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.Collection: Virgin Suicides
Grief is natural,' she said. 'Overcoming it is a matter of choice.Collection: Grief
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.Collection: Husband
A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.Collection: Faces
They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.Collection: Girl
That’s how people live, by telling stories. 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.Collection: Kids
It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Mirrors
That was the deal basically: catatonia without; frenzy withinCollection: Deals