Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness", "joy", or "regret". Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions.

I love writing for women. The willingness to go from laughter to tears in a moment is the greatest palette you can paint with as a writer.

I tried to have more than one emotion on the record.

It's a joke to think that anyone is one thing. We're all such complex creatures. But if I'm going to be a poster child for anything, anger's a gorgeous emotion. It gets a bad rap, but it can make great changes happen.

Character and emotionality don't always have to be relegated to quieter, more simple constructs.

It's fun to get really intense and emotionally detailed and complicated.

I'll always regret how I recorded 'Burgundy' 'cause it's not how I felt. The words that were coming out of my mouth and how I mean them, it's so much different.

A song is about heartbreak - but what are the constituent feelings? What are the aspects? There is anger, there is guilt, there are all these different things. I guess putting those voices into dialogue together just felt real.

I'm not sassy all day every day. I have levels and feelings.

Words felt so clumsy when she was talking about feelings and not facts.

Alas! how little can a moment show Of an eye where feeling plays In ten thousand dewy rays: A face o'er which a thousand shadows go!

Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.

Jealousy isn't a pleasant quality, but if it isn't overdone (and if it's combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there's even something touching about it.

Everyone wanted my emotions to be very simple. They wanted me to say, "I was poor and I was unhappy, and now I've got money and I'm really happy."

That's the way it goes. Some things happen and some things don't. This one is obviously just wasn't meant to be. Except deep down... I still believe it was.

We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with peanuts. Isn't that a shame we don't have many more ways to say it?

I would have thought this would make me feel better.. getting to be the one to leave and not the one left behind. But it didn't. Not at all.

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

Our lives are complex; our emotions are complex; our intellectual desires are complex. I believe that architecture … needs to mirror that complexity in every single space that we have, in every intimacy that we possess.

The challenge has always been to wrest emotion out of a doll face that we think of as only having one emotion. It's moving a light, moving my camera; it's just this mental investment that I make, and suddenly, everything changes.

I was made to believe that my life was going to be fixed and it wasn't. I'm still the same loser who had flown to Los Angeles on my sister's frequent flier miles just six days before.

What can she possibly teach you, twenty seven names for tears?

We never really know and the very fact that there are such words in the language as disappointment, regret, etc., is testimony to the pervasiveness and persistence of this feature of the human condition.

He let out a long sorry sigh and I love that look on his face, that disappointment. I understand now why girls resist,just for that sweet look of regret.

I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.