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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.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Girl
Teenage
Firsts
Twice
Remarkably
First
Near
Emergency
Baby
Michigan
Room
January
Rooms
Emergencies
Boys
Detroit
Born
August

More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

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Don't waste your time on life.
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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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The more she thought about it, the more Madeleine understood that extreme solitude didn't just describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she'd always felt when she was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it.
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That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.
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She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.
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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 think there's a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to do with the method acting that I was taught in high school and college.
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I know that attaching memories to books may be going out of the world, but while it lasts, it's a strong record of your life.
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But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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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If I write a character, instead of looking from the outside, like maybe a journalist would, trying to describe them physically and figuring out what kind of things they might be interested in or have in their house, I don't really do it that way. I try to feel what it would be like to be inside this person, to be them.
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We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.
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She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.
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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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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.
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She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.
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Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly
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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