It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully. Jeffrey Eugenides More Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides More Quotes From Jeffrey Eugenides The humming of my parents' voices from behind my bedroom wall, which throughout my childhood had filled me with a sense of security, had now become a source of anxiety and panic. Jeffrey Eugenides childhoodwallvoice Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart. Jeffrey Eugenides damsregretheart Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough. Jeffrey Eugenides enoughstorieslooks it's amazing what you can get used to. Jeffrey Eugenides enginesused 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. Jeffrey Eugenides doctorsjobspeople 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. Jeffrey Eugenides bouldersgirlclouds Scars crossed her welded wrists. Jeffrey Eugenides wristsscar 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. Jeffrey Eugenides wiremothertwo Where else would she feel more comfortable than in this subterranean realm where people wrote down what they couldn't say, where they gave voice to their most shameful longings and knowledge? Jeffrey Eugenides longingvoicepeople 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! Jeffrey Eugenides rockstwoyears 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. Jeffrey Eugenides platoforevertwo The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison. Jeffrey Eugenides differentselfmind Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy. Jeffrey Eugenides virgin-suicideswell-beingspiritual 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. Jeffrey Eugenides romecitieshands 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. Jeffrey Eugenides finalslanguagelong Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh. Jeffrey Eugenides passionplayerfather The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives. Jeffrey Eugenides grandparentmissingsound Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back. Jeffrey Eugenides moving-backmoving-aheadmoving 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. Jeffrey Eugenides solitary-lifevoicereading The ideas for my books come about in two ways. There can be an intellectual idea that seems to be the reason for writing the book. [...] The other motive is unconscious. There is something deeply psychological and emotional that draws me to the material in the first place. Jeffrey Eugenides emotionalwritingbook
