Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life.

The mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones, as in the different passages of music in a symphony. Unfortunately, many of us have feelings limited like notes in a bugle call.

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

When you're happy you don't always have to be laughing, and when you're sad you don't have to be crying; sometimes it's the opposite. You laugh when you're the most upset.

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.

Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

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?

What people call unemotional just doesnt have a single overriding emotion to it. The things that I like best are the ones that ambiguous on the emotional level.

What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet? Love isn't the only word that fails. Hate does, too.

All the world knows how to cry but not all the world knows how to sigh. Sighing is extra.

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.

When I am happy I feel like crying, but when I am sad I don’t feel like laughing. I think it is better to be happy; then you get two feelings for the price of one.

A sad, wise valor is the brave complexion.

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.

One does not always know how to express the sorrow of the soul. One does not always know how to silence the joy of the heart.

I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.

Joy mingled with sadness, even with grief, is the deepest human joy. It winds itself about the soul with indescribable sweetness, with a dim but unerring sense for what will some day be born of it.

The instinctive and universal taste of mankind selects flowers for the expression of its finest sympathies, their beauty and their fleetingness serving to make them the most fitting symbols of those delicate sentiments for which language itself seems almost too gross a medium.

She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.

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.

Silver is forty-four years old, if you can believe it, out of shape, and depressed—although he doesn’t know if you call it depression when you have good reason to be; maybe then you’re simply sad, or lonely, or just painfully aware, on a daily basis, of all the things you can never get back.

Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!

So forgive me, love, if I cry in your shower. So forgive me, love, for the salt in your bed. So forgive me, love, if I cry all afternoon.

But I believe good things happen everyday. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen. And I believe on a happy day like today, we can still feel a little sad. And that's life, isn't it?

She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad.