Quote

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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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Doe
Putting
America
Daughter
Pretended
Never
Happy
Moody
Time
Everyone
Greeks
People
Understand
Lights
Sense
Greek
Makes
Christmas
Light
Suicide

More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

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And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.
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Detroit's a great music town. If your interaction with it was mainly musical, I'm sure you have a good opinion of the place.
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.
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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.
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.
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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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Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly
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I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.
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
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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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Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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I think there's a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to do with the method acting that I was taught in high school and college.
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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It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.
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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In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.
Jeffrey Eugenides