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He knew a lot about his grandparents - and perhaps he feels he's been endowed with abilities to go into people's heads who are long dead - but, to a certain extent, he's making it up.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Making
Grandparent
Certain
Abilities
Feels
Heads
Long
Extent
People
Perhaps
Dead
Knew
Endowed
Ability
Grandparents

More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

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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
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Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.
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Detroit's a great music town. If your interaction with it was mainly musical, I'm sure you have a good opinion of the place.
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The Pulitzer Prize is an idea it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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Where else would she feel more comfortable than in this subterranean realm where people wrote down what they couldn't say, where they gave voice to their most shameful longings and knowledge?
Jeffrey Eugenides
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We're all well-acquainted with depression, we all know what the low moods are, but the mania was not something I knew much about. I didn't know that it would make someone dress extravagantly or start to pun, and to stay up and drink.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century.
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It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, Stay there. Don't move.
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We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.
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There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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I had a briefcase at one point, but it was a kind of 1980s New Wave briefcase. It was made of some kind of cardboard and it had metal hinges. It was kind of faux industrial looking, and I used to carry my books in it rather than a backpack. I didn't want to have normal student accoutrements.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.
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There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.
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College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.
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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.
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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