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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
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
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960 and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
Jeffrey Eugenides
If I write a character, instead of looking from the outside, like maybe a journalist would, trying to describe them physically and figuring out what kind of things they might be interested in or have in their house, I don't really do it that way. I try to feel what it would be like to be inside this person, to be them.
Jeffrey Eugenides
that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep
Jeffrey Eugenides
no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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
I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.
Jeffrey Eugenides
On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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
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
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.
Jeffrey Eugenides
I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides