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One of the reasons that art is important to me is sometimes it actually feels more coherent than life. It orders the chaos.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Reason
Sometimes
Coherent
Feels
Orders
Important
Chaos
Life
Reasons
Actually
Art
Order

More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep
Jeffrey Eugenides
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Well, marriage doesn't function in the way it used to in terms of deciding our fate, but it's in our heads, and it determines a lot of our actions. Like, right now, if you think about gay marriage - and they just started having the first gay marriages in New York - it shows what a potent idea marriage remains for people.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
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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During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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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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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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.
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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She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.
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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Virgin suicide What was that she cried? No use in stayin' On this holocaust ride She gave me her cherry She's my virgin suicide
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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Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been my experience.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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He remained heartbroken, which meant one of two things: either his love was pure and true and earthshakingly significant or he was addicted to feeling forlorn, he liked being heartbroken.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides