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Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Books
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More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

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Being a writer is a solitary life. So the little part of me that's an actor still enjoys the theatrical part of reading and doing the voices and telling the story.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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The more she thought about it, the more Madeleine understood that extreme solitude didn't just describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she'd always felt when she was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it.
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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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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When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said that the original human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That's why everybody's always searching for their other half. Except for us. We've got both halves already.
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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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
Jeffrey Eugenides
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We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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it's amazing what you can get used to.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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They're just memories now. Time to write them off.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep
Jeffrey Eugenides