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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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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
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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The Pulitzer Prize is an idea it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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The zipper opened all the way down our spines.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.
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
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We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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
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Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
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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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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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
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We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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
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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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
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides