Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

Each man's death is fated from the beginning of time.

Death is my son-in-law. Death is my heir. My daughter he hath wedded. I will die, And leave him all. Life, living, all is Death’s.

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

We do not ask to be born; and we do not ask to die. But born we are and die we must. We come into existence and we pass out of existence. And in neither case does high-handed fate await our ratification of its decree.

Our hour is marked, and no one can claim a moment of life beyond what fate has predestined.

No one knew where you were before you were born, but when you were born, it wasn't long before you found you'd arrived with your return ticket already punched.

No one can hurry me down to Hades before my time, but if a man's hour is come, be he brave or be he coward, there is no escape for him when he has once been born.

If it's your time to go, it's your time to go.

We have to know that life cannot be changed by us. It will be changed. But not by us. We can only guide the things that can cause physical change.

When it's your time, it is your time.

Children are the only form of immortality that we can be sure of.

The greatest legacy one can pass on to one's children and grandchildren is not money or other material things accumulated in one's life, but rather a legacy of character and faith.

I don't believe in life after death. But I do believe in some grinding destiny that watches over us on earth. If I didn't, the safety valve would give and the boiler would explode.

There are three things we have no control over: our birth; our emotions, if we're sincere; and our death.

After all, at end of the day, when you're breathing your last, it's not your producer, director, or cast mates by your bedside; it's your children. Keep that in mind.

I was blessed with a birth and a death, and I guess I just want some say in between.

I've reached the 50th year of my life, and now every question related with life also includes thinking about death. When I leave, I want to leave to my offspring a clear idea about identity.

The two grand tyrants of the Earth, Time and Chance.

The nature of life is that we do not control it.

The terrible thing about death is that it transforms life into destiny.

Destiny's Champion, Fate's fool. Eternity's Soldier, Time's Tool.

I don't know who it is who lives or dies, who rests or wakes, but it is your heart that distributes all the graces of the daybreak in my breast.

I am hanging in the balance of a perfect finished plan, like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.

It lies not in our power to love or hate, for will in us is overruled by fate.

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.