Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes.

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

2. "it's amazing what you can get used to."
- Quote by Jeffrey Eugenides

3. "But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant"
- Quote by Jeffrey Eugenides

4. "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."
- Quote by Jeffrey Eugenides

5. "We knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other..."
- Quote by Jeffrey Eugenides

6. "That’s how people live, by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? Tell me a story. That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything."
- Quote by Jeffrey Eugenides

7. "I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down. You won’t have to explain things that don’t need explaining. You’ll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don’t wish to be condescended to. I think about the reader. I care about the reader. Not audience. Not readership. Just the reader."
- Quote by Jeffrey Eugenides

8. "there are girls lined along the street, girls in miniskirts, thigh-highs, and halter tops. The girls stand at the curbs as cars cruise by. Key-lime Cadillac's, fire-red Tornadoes, wide-mouthed, trolling Lincolns, all in perfect shape. Chrome glints. Hubcaps shine. Not a single rust spot anywhere. But now the gleaming cars are slowing. Windows are rolling down and girls are bending to chat with the drivers. There are calls back and forth, the lifting of already miniscule skirts, and sometimes a flash of breast or an obscene gesture, the girls working it, laughing, high enough by 5am to be numb to the rawness between their legs and the residues of men no amount of perfume can get rid of. It isn't easy to keep yourself clean on the street, and by this hour each of those young women smells in the places that count like a very ripe, soft French cheese…They're numb, too, to thoughts of babies left at home, six month olds with bad colds lying in used cribs, sucking on pacifiers, and having a hard time breathing…numb to the lingering taste of semen in their mouths along with peppermint gum, most of these girls, no more than 18, this curb on 12th street their first real place of employment, the most the country has to offer in the way of a vocation. Where are they going to go from here? They're numb to that, too, except for a couple who have dreams of singing backup or opening up a hair shop..."
- Quote by Jeffrey Eugenides

9. "It was a little like Into the Sands, with Claude Barron, which she'd seen a couple of weeks ago. In that picture Claude Barron enlists in the Foreign Legion because Rita Carrol marries another guy. The other guy turns out to be a cheater and drinker, and so Rita Carrol leaves him and travels out to the desert where Claude Barron if fighting the Arabs. By the time Rita Carrol gets there he’s in the hospital, wounded, or not a hospital really but just a tent and she tells him she loves him and Claude Barron says, I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sky was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn’t be you. And then he dies. Tessie cried buckets. Her mascara ran, staining the collar of her blouse something awful."
- Quote by Jeffrey Eugenides

10. "She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she liked to read. The university’s British and American Literature Course Catalog was, for Madeleine, what its Bergdorf equivalent was for her roommates. A course listing like English 274: Lily’s Euphues excited Madeleine the way a pair of Fiorucci cowboy boots did Abby. English 450A: Hawthorne and James filled Madeleine with an expectation of sinful hours in bed not unlike what Olivia got from wearing a Lycra skirt and leather blazer in Danceteria. Even as a girl in their house in Prettrybrook, Madeleine wandered into the library, with its shelves of books rising higher than she could reach … and the magisterial presence of all those potentially readable words stopped her in her tracks."
- Quote by Jeffrey Eugenides