Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

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."

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!

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?

Jazz is the language of the emotions.

He wished she knew his impressions; but he would as soon have thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.

Music is the unspoken language that can convey feelings more accurately than talking ever could.

Profanity is merely an expression of one's emotions

You always want to translate as much emotion as you can, even if it's broader with bigger emotions.

Sexuality is primarily a means of communicating with other people, a way of talking to them, of expressing our feelings about ourselves and them. It is essentially a language, a body language, in which one can express gentleness and affection, anger and resentment, superiority and dependence far more succinctly than would be possible verbally, where expressions are unavoidably abstract and often clumsy.

I know I’m not supposed to say this, but I love you.

There's tons of anger and angst and peculiarity and eccentricity, and good towns know that that's okay. But towns that are kind of bullshit don't know what to do with all those feelings.

Those moments in between the moments, those are the most interesting. What's unspoken, the way we talk around things, the way our actions are inconsistent with what we're feeling, how anger and affection manifest themselves in strange ways at inappropriate times.

There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them.

Poetry is fired by love.

For me, Corsica is a place that I visited with my friends, maybe five or six times over the years, and I'm so happy there that I wanted to make a painting about it almost just to share with my friends, but it's so difficult when all your feelings are one way, and they're very sort of happy and pleasant. It's impossible to make a painting about it.

Love is not something people feel, but something people try to express no matter how they feel.

Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.

For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience.

A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.

For public opinion does not admit that lofty rapturous laughter is worthy to stand beside lofty lyrical emotion and that there isall the difference in the world between it and the antics of a clown at a fair.

Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.

Life without emotions is like an engine without fuel.

Together, we came to understand how we beg men to express feelings, but then when men do express feelings, we call it sexism, male chauvinism, or backlash.