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
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.
We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.
I think there's a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to do with the method acting that I was taught in high school and college.
There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.
It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.
Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.
There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.
Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.
Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
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.
If I write a character, instead of looking from the outside, like maybe a journalist would, trying to describe them physically and figuring out what kind of things they might be interested in or have in their house, I don't really do it that way. I try to feel what it would be like to be inside this person, to be them.
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.
Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.