Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

Your senses are reeling all the time. Finally you find something to write and the very next day you go out and see something else which totally contradicts what you've written and every conclusion you've come to.

Are you sure/That we are awake? It seems to me/That yet we sleep, we dream

Faith and doubt cannot exist in the same mind at the same time, for one will dispel the other.

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

She repeats things until they are true, or until she can't tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.

Whatever was about, whoever I had seen, and heard rocking, and who had passed me by just now, whoever had opened the locked door was not 'real'. No. But what was 'real'? At that moment I began to doubt my own reality.

We nothing know, but what is marvellous; Yet what is marvellous, we can't believe.

At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

I was ninety-nine point nine percent sure that I was dreaming.

The whole series of my life appeared to me as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality.

The "paradox" is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality "ought to be."

A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat.…We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because we are in it, we are part of it. Actually we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference beween us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick.

It's my memory, and what happened between that moment 10 or 15 years ago and now, there's a lot of gray area.

I realize that nothing's as it seems.

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.

I feel like I've dreamed half of my life that hasn't happened yet, so a lot of times I'm going along, and I do stuff, and I know that I've done it. I have deja vus more than I have regular experiences. If half of your day is a deja vu, then you start to wonder, 'What is real and what isn't?'

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

You're surprised by something, but you don't really know what surprised you; you recognize someone, but you don't really know what cues cause you to recognize that person.

I said I thought first I was on the stairs; then I remembered I was in the kitchen when he came in.

We live in a world of denial, and we don't know what the truth is anymore.

Every day after I wake up, I think, 'Wait... this can't be real; I'm still going to wake up.'

The other day I... uh, no, that wasn't me.

People talk from memory and memory often plays false.

It is not easy to distinguish reality from illusion, especially when one lives in a period of the great upheaval.