Fresh Complaint Quotes

“Pay no attention to the terrors that visit you in the night. The psyche is at its lowest ebb then, unable to defend itself. The desolation that envelops you feels like truth, but isn't. It's just mental fatigue masquerading as insight.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Fresh Complaint: Stories

“Just when she’d got her head on straight, her body started falling apart.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Fresh Complaint

“One's country is like oneself. The more you learned about it, the more there was to be ashamed of.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Fresh Complaint: Stories

“There’s a thing they’ve figured out about love. Scientifically. They’ve done studies to find out what keeps couples together. Do you know what it is? It isn’t getting along. Isn’t having money, or children, or a similar outlook on life. It’s just checking in with each other. Doing little kindnesses for each other. At breakfast, you pass the jam. Or, on a trip to New York City, you hold hands for a second in a smelly subway elevator. You ask “How was your day?” and pretend to care. Stuff like that really works.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Fresh Complaint

“When Annie flirted she didn’t always admit to herself that she was flirting. Sometimes she preferred to suspend her mental faculties so that she could flirt, as it were, without her mind watching. It was as if her body and mind separated, her body stepping behind a screen to remove its clothing while her mind, on the other side of the screen, paid no attention.”.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Fresh Complaint: Stories

“That was the ideal: to remain dutiful to a preservationist ethos while not depriving yourself of modern creature comforts.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Fresh Complaint

“Find the Bad Guy means how, when you’re arguing with your spouse, both people are trying to win the argument. Who didn’t close the garage door? Who left the Bigfoot hair clump in the shower drain? What you have to realize, as a couple, is that there is no bad guy. You can’t win an argument when you’re married. Because if you win, your spouse loses, and resents losing, and then you lose, too, pretty much.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Fresh Complaint

“One’s country was like one’s self. The more you learned about it, the more there was to be ashamed of.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Fresh Complaint: Stories

“But it’s mostly the act itself that brings relief, the self-forgetfulness, the diving and plunging into other lives.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Fresh Complaint

“Pay no attention to the terrors that visit you in the night. The psyche is at its lowest ebb then, unable to defend itself. The desolation that envelops you feels like truth, but isn’t. It’s just mental fatigue masquerading as insight.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Fresh Complaint