We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.
Jeffrey EugenidesRead
I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on how aging leads us to revisit our past rather than move forward into the future.
In this thought-provoking quote, Jeffrey Eugenides suggests that as we grow older, our experiences and memories bring us closer to our origins—childhood and ancestral ties—rather than an anticipation of the future. This perspective challenges the conventional view of aging as a linear progression, proposing instead that with age comes a deeper connection to our past, as we metaphorically time travel through the lives of those before us and ultimately commune with the dead.
Themes
AgingMemoryPastChildhoodTime Travel
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared in a discussion about the nature of time and experience during a philosophy class.
More from Jeffrey Eugenides
All quotes →It was the combination of many factors... With most people, suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The other two bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty.
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Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.
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She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she`d remember the brutal fact that had caused it.
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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.
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Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
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