Quote

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in sadness, joy, or regret. Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Language
Regret
Patriarchal
Experience
Aren
Disposal
Feelings
Emotion
Hybrid
Best
Single
Covered
Believe
Joy
Sadness
Like
Maybe
Emotions
Feeling
Proof
Words
Complicated

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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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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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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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I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are.
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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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I wanted to be an actor. My parents were not too keen on that.
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It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.
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There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.
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The window was still open.” Mr Lisbon said. “I don’t think we’d ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close it or else she’d go on jumping out of it forever
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I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.
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I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.
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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.
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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 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.
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Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.
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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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Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.
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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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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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What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.
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