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It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Neatness
Balconies
Beautifully
Apart
Took
Courage
Fall
Things

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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.
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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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If I write a character, instead of looking from the outside, like maybe a journalist would, trying to describe them physically and figuring out what kind of things they might be interested in or have in their house, I don't really do it that way. I try to feel what it would be like to be inside this person, to be them.
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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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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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I wanted to be an actor. My parents were not too keen on that.
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I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.
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We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.
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Scars crossed her welded wrists.
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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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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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Three times a day Petrovich showed up at the nurse's office for his injections, always using the hypodermic needle himself like the most craven of junkies, though after shooting up he would play the concert piano in the auditorium with astounding artistry, as though insulin were the elixir of genius.
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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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You can tell when something's not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don't go away.
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A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.
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All wisdom ends in paradox.
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Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in sadness, joy, or regret. Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions.
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Don't waste your time on life.
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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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Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.
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