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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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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There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
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We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.
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People don't save other people. People save themselves.
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One of the reasons that art is important to me is sometimes it actually feels more coherent than life. It orders the chaos.
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Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope
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She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.
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The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.
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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?
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During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.
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There is a small window of opportunity for freckled girls to tan.
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They're just memories now. Time to write them off.
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The time has to be right and the heart willing.
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that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep
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The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.
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She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.
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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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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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Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.
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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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