Jeffrey Eugenides
Jeffrey Eugenides
Jeffrey Kent Eugenidesis an American novelist and short story writer. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, and The Marriage Plot. The Virgin Suicides has been filmed, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth8 March 1960
CityDetroit, MI
CountryUnited States of America
For the eternity that Lux Lisbon looked at him, Trip Fontaine looked back, and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive real life, still plagued him, even now in the desert, with his looks and health wasted. 'You never know what'll set the memory off,' he told us. 'A baby's face. A bell on a cat's collar. Anything.' They didn't exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen.
She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.
We're all well-acquainted with depression, we all know what the low moods are, but the mania was not something I knew much about. I didn't know that it would make someone dress extravagantly or start to pun, and to stay up and drink.
We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it--that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.” -Mrs. Karafilis
I think it is important to remind people of the extent of our free will.
You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight of her made you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you knew who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences. That was the hope.
Every novelist should possess a hermaphroditic imagination.
If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.
The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.
The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before, and the pleasure you get from writing - rare but profound - remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.
We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.
The window was still open.” Mr Lisbon said. “I don’t think we’d ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close it or else she’d go on jumping out of it forever
In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.
When I think back about my immediate reaction to that redheads girl, it seems to spring from an appreciation of natural beauty. I mean the heart pleasure you get from looking at speckled leaves or the palimpsested bark of plane trees in Provence. There was something richly appealing to her color combination, the ginger snaps floating in the milk-white skin, the golden highlights in the strawberry hair. it was like autumn, looking at her. It was like driving up north to see the colors.