A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
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T.S. Eliot
Prose divides shame into stations.
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Wayne Koestenbaum
But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant
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Jeffrey Eugenides
Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.
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Mark Twain
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
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Walter Benjamin
More Quotes By Jeffrey Eugenides
A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims--these are lucky eventualites but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least...
Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.
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.
It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.
