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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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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Like
Renown
World
Obscurity
People
Dropped
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College
Wasn
Names
Real
More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides
What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.
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We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
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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.
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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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This can't be true but I remember it.
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My goal in life is to become an adjective.
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You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.
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I know that attaching memories to books may be going out of the world, but while it lasts, it's a strong record of your life.
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I saw the movie, he said. I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so - he leaned toward us - their tits bleed.
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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.
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We're all well-acquainted with depression, we all know what the low moods are, but the mania was not something I knew much about. I didn't know that it would make someone dress extravagantly or start to pun, and to stay up and drink.
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I had a briefcase at one point, but it was a kind of 1980s New Wave briefcase. It was made of some kind of cardboard and it had metal hinges. It was kind of faux industrial looking, and I used to carry my books in it rather than a backpack. I didn't want to have normal student accoutrements.
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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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Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.
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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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Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.
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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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Where else would she feel more comfortable than in this subterranean realm where people wrote down what they couldn't say, where they gave voice to their most shameful longings and knowledge?
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But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.
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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.
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