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Don't waste your time on life.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Waste
Time
Life

More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

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I'm constantly having doubts and moments of depression and then excitement and then back into the slough of despond.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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Well, marriage doesn't function in the way it used to in terms of deciding our fate, but it's in our heads, and it determines a lot of our actions. Like, right now, if you think about gay marriage - and they just started having the first gay marriages in New York - it shows what a potent idea marriage remains for people.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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I have a lot of novels that I haven't finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it's not going anywhere. I don't publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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Every letter was a love letter.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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I think there's a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to do with the method acting that I was taught in high school and college.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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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I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.'
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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They're just memories now. Time to write them off.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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People don't save other people. People save themselves.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides