Virgin suicide What was that she cried? No use in staying'On this holocaust ride She gave me her cherry She's my virgin suicide

— Jeffrey Eugenides

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.

— Jeffrey Eugenides

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. Furthermore, we knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

— Jeffrey Eugenides

We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.

— Jeffrey Eugenides

We knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other...

— Jeffrey Eugenides

We realized that the version of the world [our parents] rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their partaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns.

— Jeffrey Eugenides

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...

— Jeffrey Eugenides

When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls' emotional state at that point, he said, "Buffeted but not broken.

— Jeffrey Eugenides

Wouldn't it be nice to be done with it? To be done with sex and longing? Mitchell could almost imagine pulling it off, sitting on a bridge at night with the Seine flowing by. He looked up at all the lighted windows along the river's arc. He thought of all the people going to sleep or reading or listening to music, all the lives contained by a great city like this, and, floating up in his mind, rising just above the rooftops, he tried to feel, to vibrate among, all those million tremulous souls. Furthermore, he was sick of craving, of wanting, of hoping, of losing.

— Jeffrey Eugenides

Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.

— Jeffrey Eugenides