Jeffrey Eugenides
Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.Collection: Crush
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.Collection: Calling
It was morning by the clock but deepest nighttime in his body.Collection: Morning
I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.Collection: Long
I have a very beautiful room in my house... 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'm too distracted by things going on, so I end up writing in a not-very-nice office bedroom.Collection: Beautiful
girls forbidden to dance would only attract husbands with bad complexions and sunken chests.Collection: Girl
Bubble gum angels swooped from top margins or scraped their wings between teeming paragraphs, maidens with golden hair dripped sea blue tears into the books spine, grape-colored whales spouted blood around a newspaper item (pasted in) listing arrivals to the endangered spieces list. Six hatchlings cried from shattered shells near an entry made on Easter. Cecilia had filled the pages with a profusion of colors and curlicues, candyland ladders and striped shamrocks.Collection: Easter
It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.Collection: Girl
Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.Collection: Reading
But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephantCollection: Cells
The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.Collection: War
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.Collection: Daughter
The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.Collection: Girl
Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.Collection: Regret
All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!Collection: Rocks
Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a ropeCollection: Eye
Lux’s frequent forged excuses from phys. Ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t’s and b’s of her mother’s signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L’s reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x.Collection: Mother
Remember that day you said you loved me? Remember that? See, you could do that because you're basically a sane person, who grew up in a loving, sane family. You could take a risk like that. But in my family we didn't go around saying we loved each other. We went around screaming at each other. So what do I do, when you say you love me? I go and undermine it.Collection: Risk
Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.Collection: Thinking
You don't understand me. I'm a teenager. I've got problems!Collection: Teenager
My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.Collection: Girl
There is a small window of opportunity for freckled girls to tan.Collection: Girl
it's amazing what you can get used to.Collection: Used
The more she thought about it, the more Madeleine understood that extreme solitude didn't just describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she'd always felt when she was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it.Collection: Solitude
For the eternity that Lux Lisbon looked at him, Trip Fontaine looked back, and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive real life, still plagued him, even now in the desert, with his looks and health wasted. 'You never know what'll set the memory off,' he told us. 'A baby's face. A bell on a cat's collar. Anything.' They didn't exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen.Collection: Baby
She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.Collection: Writing
College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.Collection: Real
Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century.Collection: Half
What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets." (...) "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.Collection: Girl
Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.Collection: Cities
Virgin suicide What was that she cried? No use in stayin' On this holocaust ride She gave me her cherry She's my virgin suicideCollection: Suicide
Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.Collection: Glimpse
Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.Collection: Moving
Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.Collection: Looks
I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people-and especially doctors- had doubts about normality. They weren't sure normality was up the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.Collection: Jobs
I remember liking to write stories pretty early on. In fourth or fifth grade, they would give us the beginning of a story, and we were supposed to finish it. I remember liking that. But I didn't think about deciding to become a writer until high school at about the age of 16.Collection: Writing
Detroit's a great music town. If your interaction with it was mainly musical, I'm sure you have a good opinion of the place.Collection: Musical
I'm constantly having doubts and moments of depression and then excitement and then back into the slough of despond.Collection: Doubt
When I'm creating a character, it's a little bit like what my theater teachers used to tell me about Stanislavsky, like if you're using sense memory to do a scene - if you have to cry in a scene, you try to remember something in your life that made you cry and you use that in order to get the tears.Collection: Teacher
If I write a character, instead of looking from the outside, like maybe a journalist would, trying to describe them physically and figuring out what kind of things they might be interested in or have in their house, I don't really do it that way. I try to feel what it would be like to be inside this person, to be them.Collection: Writing
I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever.Collection: Stories
There was nowhere I could go that wouldn’t be you.Collection: Romance
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
I think, especially when you’re in college, each book that you’re reading tends to tell you who you are.Collection: Reading
I know that attaching memories to books may be going out of the world, but while it lasts, it’s a strong record of your life.Collection: Strong