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.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

Jeffrey Eugenides

learning love life

It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

Jeffrey Eugenides

confused air water

There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.

Jeffrey Eugenides

woods moments home

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

speak noise book

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.

Jeffrey Eugenides

repetition essentials facts

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

handwriting normal may

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.

Jeffrey Eugenides

hurt mind depression

Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life.

Jeffrey Eugenides

regret disappointment believe

She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself.

Jeffrey Eugenides

wanted book

You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.

Jeffrey Eugenides

i-hate-you over-it bother

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

Jeffrey Eugenides

reading writing book

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.

Jeffrey Eugenides

struggle winning goodbye

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

up-north autumn color

In the midst of my skeptical, cynical, often pessimistic nature exists a slender capacity to believe, if only temporarily, in a guiding, unseen power, and whenever this happens, I go with it. That's what inspiration is. You don't get it from the gods. You make it.

Jeffrey Eugenides

cynical inspiration believe

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

Jeffrey Eugenides

english-major majors reason

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.

Jeffrey Eugenides

connections children world

But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.

Jeffrey Eugenides

birth and-love mean

The time has to be right and the heart willing.

Jeffrey Eugenides

willing heart

Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.

Jeffrey Eugenides

heartbroken heartbreak

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.

Jeffrey Eugenides

girl spring appreciation