Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

I think all men when they get older, they look at the mirror and they probably see their father a little bit.

You know when you're young you think you will always be. As you become more fragile, you reflect and you realize how much comfort can come from the past. Hymns can carry you into the future.

I thoroughly object to getting old. If you could let me be 16 again, I'd give you everything I've got and everything I'll ever have.

The notion of time bothers me. You look at thirty-year-old photographs and realize how the time has passed.

I'm saving that rocker for the day when I feel as old as I really am.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

With our parents we bury our past, with our children our future.

I think a lot about the past, it's true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. And there is not much percentage in the future.

Life is short. Time is short. As we get older, time does quicken. It's long, and it's long pertaining to that thought, that the past is not done with you because you can't rid of it.

You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all. As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.

One may return to the place of his birth, He cannot go back to his youth.

This was when I heard that the first symptom of old age is when you begin to resemble your father.

I see no comfort in outliving one's friends, and remaining a mere monument of the times which are past.

Time slips away and leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of glory days.

I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn't something I'm very good at.

And if I say to you that I am glad of everything we have done together, and sorry that we will not be here together in forty years, laughing at a faded photo of you impersonating a lion, it having withered well, you less so, as we stand fabulously old, in a city that understands what spirit it takes to be old, to be beautiful, to be much looked at, to be itself, to be never quite caught, to have a past, to be content, to have seen much, to have remained, to have continued...

I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago, and of people who will see a world that I shall never know.

The child is father of the man: And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.

That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.

Photographs open doors into the past, but they also alloq a look into the future

What is human life? The first third a good time; the rest remembering about it.

I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past

That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.

She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.