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A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Visible
Thoughts
Second
Face
Faces
Another
Beneath
Prose

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All wisdom ends in paradox.
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In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.
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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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I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960 and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
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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.
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When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.
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The window was still open.” Mr Lisbon said. “I don’t think we’d ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close it or else she’d go on jumping out of it forever
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At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.
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And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.
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On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.
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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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I'm constantly having doubts and moments of depression and then excitement and then back into the slough of despond.
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Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'
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This can't be true but I remember it.
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Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.
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Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.
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In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.
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They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us.
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Lux spent the ride dialing the radio for her favorite song. It makes me crazy, she said. You know they're playing it somewhere, but you have to find it.
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