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During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Collected
Winter
Warm
Rain
Water

More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

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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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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.
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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.
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The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.
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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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We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
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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I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.
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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She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.
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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To start with, look at all the books.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world
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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It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.
Jeffrey Eugenides