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But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Love
Wasn
Bigs
Born
Death
Ends
Mean
Things
Never
Birth

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Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking it's passage for some reason.
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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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Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.
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If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.
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Virgin suicide What was that she cried? No use in stayin' On this holocaust ride She gave me her cherry She's my virgin suicide
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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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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.
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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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There is a small window of opportunity for freckled girls to tan.
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We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it--that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.” -Mrs. Karafilis
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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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She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.
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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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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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She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.
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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no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
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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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All wisdom ends in paradox.
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