“She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“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, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“I don’t know what you’re feeling. I won’t even pretend.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the 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 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“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, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“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, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“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, quote from 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, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“Words, words, word. Once, I had the gift. I could make love out of words as a potter makes cups of clay. Love that overthrows empire. Love that binds two hearts together, come hellfire & brimstone. For sixpence a line, I could cause a riot in a nunnery. But now -- I have lost my gift. It's as if my quill is broken, as if the organ of my imagination has dried up, as if the proud -illegible word- of my genius has collapsed.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“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, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“They're just memories now. Time to write them off.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“The time has to be right and the heart willing.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“The zipper opened all the way down our spines.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, quote from 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, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, quote from The Virgin Suicides
“The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, quote from The Virgin Suicides
Jeffrey Eugenides
Born place: in Detroit, Michigan, The United States
Born date March 8, 1960
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“All about them the golden girls, shopping for dainties in Lairville. Even in the midst of the wild-maned winter's chill, skipping about in sneakers and sweatsocks, cream-colored raincoats. A generation in the mold, the Great White Pattern Maker lying in his prosperous bed, grinning while the liquid cools. But he does not know my bellows. Someone there is who will huff and will puff. The sophmores in their new junior blazers, like Saturday's magazines out on Thursday. Freshly covered textbooks from the campus store, slide rules dangling in leather, sheathed broadswords, chinos scrubbed to the virgin fiber, starch pressed into straight-razor creases, Oxford shirts buttoned down under crewneck sweaters, blue eyes bobbing everywhere, stunned by the android synthesis of one-a-day vitamins, Tropicana orange juice, fresh country eggs, Kraft homogenized cheese, tetra-packs of fortified milk, Cheerios with sun-ripened bananas, corn-flake-breaded chicken, hot fudge sundaes, Dairy Queen root beer floats, cheeseburgers, hybrid creamed corn, riboflavin extract, brewer's yeast, crunchy peanut butter, tuna fish casseroles, pancakes and imitation maple syrup, chuck steaks, occasional Maine lobster, Social Tea biscuits, defatted wheat germ, Kellogg's Concentrate, chopped string beans, Wonderbread, Birds Eye frozen peas, shredded spinach, French-fried onion rings, escarole salads, lentil stews, sundry fowl innards, Pecan Sandies, Almond Joys, aureomycin, penicillin, antitetanus toxoid, smallpox vaccine, Alka-Seltzer, Empirin, Vicks VapoRub, Arrid with chlorophyll, Super Anahist nose spray, Dristan decongestant, billions of cubic feet of wholesome, reconditioned breathing air, and the more wholesome breeds of fraternal exercise available to Western man. Ah, the regimented good will and force-fed confidence of those who are not meek but will inherit the earth all the same.”
― Richard Fariña, quote from Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me
“Armenians have more imagination than Mohammedans.”
― Kurban Said, quote from Ali and Nino: A Love Story
“I found that I almost envied his pain. He hurt because he remembered.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Fledgling
“if poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters.”
― William Gibson, quote from Burning Chrome
“In my old age, I was at last being permitted to make the discovery that lovemaking gets better and better with time, if it's with someone you care for.”
― Patricia Nell Warren, quote from The Front Runner
Wiseguy
More Happy Than Not
Jimmy Corrigan, the...
Sourcery
The Future of an Ill...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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