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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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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Else
Anything
Heart
Operated
Instructions
Instruction
Indeed
Understood
Control

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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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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.
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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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Virgin suicide What was that she cried? No use in stayin' On this holocaust ride She gave me her cherry She's my virgin suicide
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It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.
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I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.
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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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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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People don't save other people. People save themselves.
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But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.
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A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.
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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.
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Detroit's a great music town. If your interaction with it was mainly musical, I'm sure you have a good opinion of the place.
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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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This can't be true but I remember it.
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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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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.
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In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.
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There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
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Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.
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