Quote

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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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Inside
Body
Look
Self
Inspect
Looks
Edits
Different
Comparison
Thing
Compare
Mind
Outside

More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

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The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.
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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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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People don't save other people. People save themselves.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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Lux spent the ride dialing the radio for her favorite song. It makes me crazy, she said. You know they're playing it somewhere, but you have to find it.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants' as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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He remained heartbroken, which meant one of two things: either his love was pure and true and earthshakingly significant or he was addicted to feeling forlorn, he liked being heartbroken.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.
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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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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it's amazing what you can get used to.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.
Jeffrey Eugenides