Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

In any case, suffice it to say I enjoyed hearing about faraway places. I had stocked up a whole store of these places, like a bear getting ready for hibernation. I'd close my eyes, and streets would materialize, rows of houses take shape. I could hear people's voices, feel the gentle, steady rhythm of their lives, those people so distant, whom I'd probably never know.

The underground of the city is like what's underground in people. Beneath the surface, it's boiling with monsters.

I am the voice of the people in Iran whose voices are silent and whose demands cannot be heard by the rest of the world.

"She was right about something else too," Dimitri said after a long pause. My back was to him, but there was a strange quality to his voice that made me turn around. "What's that?" I asked. "That I do still love you." With that one sentence, everything in the universe changed.

People like the way dreams have of sticking to the soul.

You hear as many things as you would imagine. I hear voices of people I loved once. I hear moments that took place. I hear silences.

Oswald: "All your life" Aurore: "What?" Oswald: "All your life, isn't that what you wanted to know? How long I loved you?" Aurore: "Well, yes, I suppose I did, but that wasn't what I was going to ask just now." Oswald: "I tell you I've loved you since the day you were born, and you tell me you want to know something else. There's no one quite like you, is there, Aurore?

I have been the subject of ridicule. People talk about me and they don't know me and this is an opportunity to tell my story ... to have my voice and to set the record straight.

My life has been about living like a monk and looking like a priest so that people will come up to me and tell me their most appalling stories. They have to make their confession to somebody, and it might as well be me.

Under the pavement the dirt is dreaming of grass.

It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.

What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?

A voice that was never wanted has become a voice for so many people who don’t have one.

You see that gap is exactly how they can marginalize and exclude people from giving the voters more voices and choices.

If people only knew what lies at the heart of my novels! What a tumult of desires these carefully written pages conceal! I sometimes have a loathing for the furious cravings that give me no peace except when I am working.

It was always the same; other people gave up loving before she did. They got spoilt, or else they went away; in any case, they were partly to blame. Why did it happen so? She herself never changed; when she loved anyone, it was for life. She could not understand desertion; it was something so huge, so monstrous that the notion of it made her little heart break.

You know, some people got no choice, and they can never find a voice, to talk with that they can even call their own. So the first thing that they see, that allows them the right to be, why they follow it, you know, it's called bad luck.

And in fact you're not like everyone else: you weren't ashamed just now to confess bad and even ridiculous things about yourself. Who would confess such things nowadays? No one, and people have even stopped feeling any need for self-judgment.

I love raising awareness and encouraging people to take action for World Environment Day, because it demonstrates how individual voices can become a global chorus for change.

In all my life I'd never been approached this way, the car pulling up, the Where you going? It was something I wish had happened hundreds of times. I was a looker - someone who looked over at every car at every traffic light, hoping something would happen, and almost never finding anyone looking back - always everyone looking forwards, and every time I felt stupid. Why should people look at you? Why should they care?

Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns...We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.

Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met.

And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But O for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still!

I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who've found a distinctive voice.

Some people want it all But I don't want nothing at all If it ain't you baby If I ain't got you baby Some people want diamond rings Some just want everything But everything means nothing If I ain't got you, Yeah