"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

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

"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)

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

"Scars crossed her welded wrists"
— 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 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)

"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)

"Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)