Jeffrey Eugenides quote: "I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history."

I had a briefcase at one point, but it was a kind of 1980s New Wave briefcase. It was made of some k...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

At the same time, it's a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Phyllida's hair was where her power resided. It was expensively set into a smooth dome, like a band ...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or ...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you e...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on r...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believe...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sky ...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

We Greeks get married in circles, to impress upon ourselves the essential matrimonial facts: that to...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

And so now, having been born, I'm going to rewind the film, so that my pink blanket flies off, my cr...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; an...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

I know that attaching memories to books may be going out of the world, but while it lasts, it's ...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and l...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Lux spent the ride dialing the radio for her favorite song. "It makes me crazy," she said. "You know...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of ...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even d...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, o...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had lov...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think abou...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to bo...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Speramus meliora; resurgret cineribus. "We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes,
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all norm...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

What were he and his friends doing, really, other than hanging from a branch, sticking their tongues...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deli...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

She had just started living like a grown-up and she'd never felt more vulnerable, frightened or conf...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial li...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and ...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

I want an ending that's satisfying. I'm more of a classical writer than a modernist one in t...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Pay no attention to the terrors that visit you in the night. The psyche is at its lowest ebb then, u...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

You used to be able to tell a person's nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you dis...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of l...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words.
I don't believe in "sadness", "joy"...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest si...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

When I think back about my immediate reaction to that redheads girl, it seems to spring from an appr...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it lov...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

The only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream ever...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

But maybe they understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value ...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. An...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. F...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, ...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that le...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets peopl...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could fe...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand ...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

This was a characteroloical prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of mela...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Listening to Leonard, Madeleine felt impoverished by her happy childhood. She never wondered why she...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;
Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching Earth;
Lie close...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

As they were walking, a beggar came up, holding his hand out and crying, "Baksheesh! Baksheesh!"
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Lefty, who'd been observing all the ways Greece had been handed down to America, arrived now at wher...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

In those days you could identify a person's nationality by smell. Lying on her back with eyes closed...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

The Pulitzer isn't a physical object. You can't hold it in your hand. You get some money ($7...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in t...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

It was always embarrassing when professors assigned their own books. Even Madeleine, who found all t...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

According to an ancient Chinese legend, one day in the year 240 B.C., Princess Si Ling-chi was sitti...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she p...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Every letter was a love letter.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Virgin suicide
What was that she cried?
No use in stayin'
On this holocaust ride
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

I don’t know what you’re feeling. I won’t even pretend.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

He hadn't suffered the eternity of the ring about to be picked up, didn't know the heart rush of hea...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puff...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

We had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us... calling them out o...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

The time has to be right and the heart willing.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

The zipper opened all the way down our spines.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

They're just memories now. Time to write them off.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Words, words, word. Once, I had the gift. I could make love out of words as a potter makes cups of c...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, ...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfac...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

All wisdom ends in paradox.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live a...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her ou...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

I saw the movie," he said. "I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelv...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, ...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

After the Second World War, San Francisco was the main point of re-entry for sailors returning from ...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to a...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Desde temprana edad eran conscientes del escaso valor que el mundo daba a los libros, de manera que ...
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Psychopaths know the technical difference between right and wrong - which is one of the reasons thei...
JEFFREY KLUGER

I only know from my own personal experience, and I personally feel that there's a cyclical natur...
JEFFREY JONES

Older fatherhood isn't all bad: testosterone rates drop about 1% per year as men age, making the...
JEFFREY KLUGER

The longer you wait, the less fun. If you wait until the bitter end, the whole economy can be destro...
JEFFREY SACHS

Advertisers don't want to be ignored, and they are drunk on our data, which is what Google and o...
JEFFREY ZELDMAN

Great people have great values and great ethics.
JEFFREY GITOMER

The great leaders of the second world war alliance, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, unders...
JEFFREY SACHS

Despite a decade of criticism and budget cuts, the specialised UN agencies have far more expertise a...
JEFFREY SACHS

There are times between five and seven when this house is like a bowling alley, but it's reinspi...
JEFFREY TAMBOR

Great salespeople are relationship builders who provide value and help their customers win.
JEFFREY GITOMER

I graduated from high school in 1963. There were no computers, cell phones, Internet, credit cards, ...
JEFFREY GITOMER

What people fear most about tragedy is its randomness - a taxi cab jumps the curb and hits a pedestr...
JEFFREY KLUGER

The buyer, the prospect, the customer expects you to have knowledge of their stuff, not just your st...
JEFFREY GITOMER

I think most of my heroes are not the traditional types. A guy I was fascinated with was Buster Keat...
JEFFREY TAMBOR

I wanted to be a writer, to write these stories that would make people see the world in a different ...
JEFFREY SKOLL

Social media presents an opportunity for business people to connect and know each other prior to a p...
JEFFREY GITOMER

The debts are unaffordable. If they won't cancel the debts I would suggest obstruction; you do i...
JEFFREY SACHS

I have a green thumb. I really like to get into the shrubs, the bushes, and really cultivate.
JEFFREY DONOVAN

What would surprise a lot of people about me... I'm a gardener! I have a green thumb. I really l...
JEFFREY DONOVAN

I grew up in an upper-middle-class town with a population around 12,000. My high school held around ...
JEFFREY GITOMER

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.
JEFFREY TATE

Bad science and bad religion simply swap roles, the former proclaiming Truth, the latter worshiping ...
JEFFREY SATINOVER

We had a booming stock market in 1929 and then went into the world's greatest depression. We hav...
JEFFREY SACHS

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. The desire and ability to press on has and a...
JEFFREY FRY

Many people see themselves as a rose, when all they are is just a prick.
JEFFREY FRY

My family went through divorces and remarriages and the later, blended home - and then watched that ...
JEFFREY KLUGER

The printed word will be around long after many of our digital creations are gone, either because bo...
JEFFREY ZELDMAN

My website, my email magazine, my blog, my books, my corporate seminars, and my public seminars all ...
JEFFREY GITOMER

If you like a person at their worst, you will love them at their best.
JEFFREY FRY

You know that you're a true friend when somebody says "But what about that wart on the end of his no...
JEFFREY MICHAEL

The tendency to whining and complaining may be taken as the surest sign symptom of little souls and ...
LORD JEFFREY

Good will, like a good name, is got by many actions, and lost by one.
LORD JEFFREY

I was allowed to ring the bell for five minutes until everyone was in assembly. It was the beginning...
JEFFREY ARCHER

It seems to me that the best relationships, the ones that last, are frequently the ones rooted in fr...
JEFFREY BELL

There is convincing evidence that the search for solitude is not a luxury but a biological need. Jus...
JEFFREY KOTTLER

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are at risk every day of their lives.
JEFFREY MONTGOMERY

Good design can't fix broken business models.
JEFFREY VEEN

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.
FRANCIS JEFFREY

I can't say enough about the guts and the talents of Amazon. They're so agile, they're s...
JEFFREY TAMBOR

Science has yet to isolate the Godiva Chocolate or Prada gene, but that doesn't mean your weakne...
JEFFREY KLUGER

I had a sense of debt to the medical profession and to surgery particularly. I would not be as ambie...
JEFFREY TATE

Suffering is always hard to quantify - especially when the pain is caused by as cruel a disease as A...
JEFFREY KLUGER

We use social media as an adjunct to my total media/market outreach.
JEFFREY GITOMER

As with real reading, the ability to comprehend subtlety and complexity comes only with time and a l...
JEFFREY KLUGER

In Hamburg, there are three major orchestras, an opera house, and one of the great concert-hall acou...
JEFFREY TATE

It's one of the worst-kept secrets of family life that all parents have a preferred son or daugh...
JEFFREY KLUGER

The mind and the body are inextricably entwined, and rarely are their inseparability clearer than wh...
JEFFREY KLUGER

The job of the Attorney General is very specific. My roll, as the legal adviser, is to defend the co...
JEFFREY CHIESA

A cockroach likely has no less brainpower than a butterfly, but we're quicker to deny it conscio...
JEFFREY KLUGER

My readers and my audiences have turned into my followers. They are more than interested in what I h...
JEFFREY GITOMER

Your grammar is a reflection of your image. Good or bad, you have made an impression. And like all i...
JEFFREY GITOMER

What I love most about animation is, it's a team sport, and everything we do is about pure imagi...
JEFFREY KATZENBERG

It's a deep and all but certain truth about narcissistic personalities that to meet them is to l...
JEFFREY KLUGER

I don't mind that I am not necessarily a household name, because I think my characters have outs...
JEFFREY WRIGHT

In my view, there is an urgent need to communicate with the public and help to explain where there i...
JEFFREY SACHS

The key in mastering any kind of sales is switching statements about you and how great you are and w...
JEFFREY GITOMER

In sales, it's not what you say; it's how they perceive what you say.
JEFFREY GITOMER

There is no prize in sales for second place. It's win or nothing. The masters know this and stri...
JEFFREY GITOMER

There's no lotion or potion that will make sales faster and easier for you - unless your potion ...
JEFFREY GITOMER

Spending $1 for a brand new house would feel very, very good. Spending $1,000 for a ham sandwich wou...
JEFFREY KLUGER

I like New York because you're kind of forced to smell everybody else's funk. So it keeps yo...
JEFFREY WRIGHT

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is part of our constitutional rights and it belongs to e...
JEFFREY TAMBOR

Vaccines save lives; fear endangers them. It's a simple message parents need to keep hearing.
JEFFREY KLUGER

The tendency to whining and complaining may be taken as the surest sign symptom of little souls and ...
FRANCIS JEFFREY

It was tragic how life had sucked her down to the bones, all her spontaneity her laughter and freedo...
BELINDA JEFFREY

As the National Football League and other pro sports increasingly reckon with the early dementia, me...
JEFFREY KLUGER

Once I thought I found love, but then I realized I was just out
of cigarettes.
JEFFREY MCDANIEL

We're in a post-conceptual era where it's really the artist's idea and vision that are p...
JEFFREY DEITCH

Wisdom comes when you realize the pain, people, or problems life used to produce you now push you.
JEFFREY FRY

My views tend to be centrist. I'm not a big fan of George W., but my politics tend to be more Re...
JEFFREY SKOLL

Overspending is as certain a part of the holiday season as overeating. But pushing away from both th...
JEFFREY KLUGER

I feel I have had a very interesting life, but I am rather hoping there is still more to come. I sti...
JEFFREY ARCHER

The head coach is the chemist.
JEFFREY LURIE

The chief executive officer is also the chief sales officer. He or she is responsible for the succes...
JEFFREY GITOMER

Great leadership involves three things. The ability to realize when you are wrong, a willingness to ...
JEFFREY FRY

Is there anything sadder than the foods of the 1950s? Canned, frozen, packaged concoctions, served u...
JEFFREY KLUGER

Since narcissism is fueled by a greater need to be admired than to be liked, psychologists might use...
JEFFREY KLUGER

Identical twins are ideal lab specimens for studying the difference between learned and inherited tr...
JEFFREY KLUGER

There's only one thing harder than living in a home with an adolescent - and that's being an...
JEFFREY KLUGER

Indeed, the best way to think of willpower is not as some shapeless behavioral trait but as a sort o...
JEFFREY KLUGER

All behavioral or mood disorders - including depression, OCD, ADHD and addiction - have some neuroch...
JEFFREY KLUGER

It's far too much to say that effective hoping is the only - or even the biggest - part of what ...
JEFFREY KLUGER

Kids whose puberty begins too soon face not just psychological risks, but physical ones too, with an...
JEFFREY KLUGER

Concert-going has become much less the thing to do, while people are still going to opera. This migh...
JEFFREY TATE

Stories are great, but at the end of the day, you remember that moment and that moment and that mome...
JEFFREY BELL

Students follow rules. Students complete assignments. The job of students - in part, at least - is t...
JEFFREY TOOBIN

In Asia, a lot of successful economies that had been living on their own saving, decided to open up ...
JEFFREY SACHS

I've been in three sort of... I mean, I'd say they're groundbreaking series, if only bec...
JEFFREY TAMBOR

Odds are you know some narcissists. Odds are they're smart, confident and articulate. They make ...
JEFFREY KLUGER

I was always most interested in drawing - most of my childhood drawings are black-and-white line wor...
JEFFREY BROWN

Every batch of sperm represents an opportunity for genetic typos - called de novo mutations - to be ...
JEFFREY KLUGER

Marketing is not bragging, and touting one's wares is not evil. The baker in the medieval town s...
JEFFREY ZELDMAN

I actually got thrown into my Bar Mitzvah because my teacher, my Cantor, did not tell me that they w...
JEFFREY TAMBOR

I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore with an extremely high concentration of Jewish families - where t...
JEFFREY KLUGER

I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.

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Jeffrey Eugenides

I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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