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She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something 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
Something
Birth
Life
Started
Nursed
Knew
Corner
Known
Corners
Given
Suddenly
Else
Brought
Matter
Turned
Thing
Became

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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 changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.
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Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.
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The Pulitzer Prize is an idea it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
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If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.
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All wisdom ends in paradox.
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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.
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Mitchell had answered that, as far as he understood them, mystical experiences were significant only to the extent that they changed a person's conception of reality, and if that changed conception led to a change in behavior and action, a loss of ego.
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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.
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no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.
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People don't save other people. People save themselves.
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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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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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There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.
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The time has to be right and the heart willing.
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My goal in life is to become an adjective.
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What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.
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