Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

″ We knew that the girls were our twins ... they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. ”

“Obviously, Doctor ... you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl. ”

″ It wasn’t gross but a beautiful thing, you had to see it, like a modern painting or something. ”

“Cecilia had released an airborne virus which the other girls ... had contracted. ”

“She was the still point of the turning world,”

“The majority of dying had happened during the Second World War when we didn’t exist. ”

“That girl didn’t want to die. She just wanted out of that house. She wanted out of that decorating scheme.”

“Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she’d fly.”

“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.”

“Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls. Our parents thought it had to do with our music, our godlessness, or the loosening of morals regarding sex we hadn’t even had.”

“I’m, being the girls’ mother, should understand them more than anyone. But that’s what’s so frightening. I don’t know. Once they’re out of you, they’re different, kids are. Leaving their home, they will become another’s.”

“We saw the light in her eyes we have been looking for ever since. ”

“The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness.”

“but none of these signs of malnourishment or illness or grief … detracted from Lux’s overwhelming impression of being a carnal angel.”

“In the end, it wasn’t death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life. She couldn’t understand how the Lisbons kept so quiet, why they didn’t wail to heaven or go mad.”

“They made us participate in their own madness. ”

“The outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. ”

“She had unbuckled us ... only to stall us, so that she and her sisters could die in peace. ”

“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. ”

“Cecilia was weird, but we’re not ... We just want to live. If anyone would let us. ”