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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
Instructions
Instruction
Indeed
Understood
Control
Else
Anything
Heart
Operated

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No matter how long your've been at it, you always start from scratch.
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During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.
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The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.
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My goal in life is to become an adjective.
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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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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
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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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On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.
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There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.
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They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.
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It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.
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The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.
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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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Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.
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I wanted to be an actor. My parents were not too keen on that.
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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.
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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.
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In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.
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