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I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Thinking
Tends
Especially
College
Reading
Tell
Book
Think

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This can't be true but I remember it.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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All wisdom ends in paradox.
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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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that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep
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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.
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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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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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Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.
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The time has to be right and the heart willing.
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Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.
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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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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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They're just memories now. Time to write them off.
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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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-Who are you, anyway? -Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.
Jeffrey Eugenides