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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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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Found
Suicide
Able
Wrote
Suicides
Would
Rules
Virgin
Gave
Virgins
Boys
Report
Told
Strict
Seen
Reports
Voice
Narrative

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We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in.
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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.
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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.
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Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.
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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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We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
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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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That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.
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I wanted to be an actor. My parents were not too keen on that.
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Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.
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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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The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.
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I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.
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Where else would she feel more comfortable than in this subterranean realm where people wrote down what they couldn't say, where they gave voice to their most shameful longings and knowledge?
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She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.
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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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It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, Stay there. Don't move.
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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.
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Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.
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She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.
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