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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
Ends
Mean
Things
Never
Birth
Love
Wasn
Bigs
Born
Death

More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

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I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.
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Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.
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He remained heartbroken, which meant one of two things: either his love was pure and true and earthshakingly significant or he was addicted to feeling forlorn, he liked being heartbroken.
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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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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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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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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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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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No matter how long your've been at it, you always start from scratch.
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But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.
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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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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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Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.
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A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.
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We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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I wanted to be an actor. My parents were not too keen on that.
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides