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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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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Versions
Believed
Realized
Really
World
Rendered
Parenting
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More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

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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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that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep
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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.
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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.'
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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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A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.
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There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
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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.
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and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world
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It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.
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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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I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sku was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
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You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.
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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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One of the reasons that art is important to me is sometimes it actually feels more coherent than life. It orders the chaos.
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.
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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.
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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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A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.
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