Quote

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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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Pain
Keeping
Cared
Understand
Winter
Ache
Girl
Played
Rope
Felt
Baseball
Compelled
Drab
Together
Girls
Compliment
Infuriating
Much
Boys
Jump
Skirt
Never
Knew
Mature
Skirts
Class
Knees
Rushing

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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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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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-Who are you, anyway? -Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.
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There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
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Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been my experience.
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Three times a day Petrovich showed up at the nurse's office for his injections, always using the hypodermic needle himself like the most craven of junkies, though after shooting up he would play the concert piano in the auditorium with astounding artistry, as though insulin were the elixir of genius.
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Every letter was a love letter.
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It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.
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There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said that the original human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That's why everybody's always searching for their other half. Except for us. We've got both halves already.
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The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.
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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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We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in.
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She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.
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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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I saw the movie, he said. I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so - he leaned toward us - their tits bleed.
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But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant
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They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.
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