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But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Attention
Keep
Care
Trying
Long
Reader

More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

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They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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The Pulitzer Prize is an idea it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
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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They're just memories now. Time to write them off.
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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Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.
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
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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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I know that attaching memories to books may be going out of the world, but while it lasts, it's a strong record of your life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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People don't save other people. People save themselves.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.
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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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.
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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Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.
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