Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

I felt the crumpled paper that had taken the place of my lungs expand as if released from a fist.

Oh, say! what is that thing call'd light, Which I must ne'er enjoy? What are the blessings of the sight? Oh, tell your poor blind boy!

Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire

Pain, I came to feel, might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh, the sole physical expression of consciousness. As my body acquired muscle, and in turn strength, there was gradually born within me a tendency towards the positive acceptance of pain, and my interest in physical suffering deepened.

I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.

Inwardly, I gouged my eyes out.

Pain of mind is worse than pain of body.

No, I call. Come back. I'm here, he says. But I can't see. It's too bright. You can't hold back the light, Gemma. I'm here. Trust me.

Anger simply shows that something in you is hurt, some wound is there.

The ocean of the body crashes against the ocean of the heart. Between them is a barrier they cannot cross.

It is an awful thing to be betrayed by your body. And it’s lonely, because you feel you can’t talk about it.

Rilla's heart skipped a beat — or, if that be a physiological impossibility, she thought it did.

Pain is a message, and you can choose to ignore that message.

To have a certain new eight-and-a-hal f-minute-old light from the sun-to feel it physically, almost as we taste things-this is where you can work with light like that.

How was it that he haunted her imagination so persistently? What could it be? Why did she care for what he thought, in spite of all her pride in spite of herself? She believed that she could have borne the sense of Almighty displeasure, because He knew all, and could read her penitence, and hear her cries for help in time to come. But Mr.Thornton-why did she tremble, and hide her face in the pillow? What strong feeling had overtaking her at last?

happened as I listened: I felt pain. Not in my head, not in my arm, not in my leg; everywhere at once. I told myself there was no difference between being “inside” and being “outside,” that it all came down to X’s and O’s that could be acquired in any number of different ways, but the pain increased to a point where I thought I might collapse, and I limped away.

Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest--like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn't noticed--weren't sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward. If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were I'm sorry.

It's terrifying to see someone inside of whom a vital spring seems to have been broken. It's particularly terrifying to see him in your mirror.

Alexia blinked stupidly at the Beta from around the earl’s upper arm. Her heart was doing crazy things, and she still could not locate her kneecaps. She took a deep breath and put some serious attention into tracking them down.

She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.

There are periods of despondency and suffering which take possession of me. But I don't want anything but my own way. That is wanting a good deal, of course, when you have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, the prejudices of others-

With throbbing veins and burning skin, eyes wild and heavy, thoughts hurried and disordered, he felt as though the light were a reproach, and shrunk involuntarily from the day as if he were some foul and hideous thing.