Jeffrey Eugenides

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

It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

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

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly.

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

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.