"Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind."
— Jeffrey Eugenides

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." 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." 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, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. "
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"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. "
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"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."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"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."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Withen 5 minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? Your not even old enough to know how bad life gets." And it was then Cecelia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a 13 year old girl.""
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims--these are lucky eventualites but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.

We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.

And we certainly wouldn't write about it."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead)

"I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am. "
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"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 (Middlesex)

"Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly"
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"...we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us... 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."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubborness of life."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"... 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 (Middlesex)

"(But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant ...)"
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"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."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some 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."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"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."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"But maybe the Charm Bracelets understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing, I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind. "
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"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."
— Jeffrey Eugenides

""it's amazing what you can get used to.""
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

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

"We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in..."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"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. "
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"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 (Middlesex)

"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."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"I don’t know what you’re feeling, I won’t even pretend"
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"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."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"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."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"The zipper opened all the way down our spines."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"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 (Middlesex)

"Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words.
I don't believe in "sadness", "joy", or "regret".
Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"My family suffered. My hair turned up in every corner, every drawer, every meal. Even in the rice puddings Tessie made, covering each little bowl with wax paper before putting it away in the fridge--even into these prophylactically secure desserts my hair found its way! Jet black hairs wound themselves around bars of soap. They lay pressed like flower stems between the pages of books. They turned up in eyeglass cases, birthday cards, once--I swear--inside an egg Tessie had just cracked. The next-door neighbor's cat coughed up a hairball one day and the hair was not the cat's."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under her chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets."
And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of a suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "You've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.""
— Jeffrey Eugenides

"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 calling them from out of those rooms... where they went to be alone for all time... and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"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 (Middlesex)

"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 (Middlesex)

"A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or tell each other how pretty we were. 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 allexisted in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn'y fathom them at all. We knew finally that the girls were really woman in diquise, that they understood love even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)