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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
Able
Wrote
Suicides
Would
Rules
Virgin
Gave
Virgins
Boys
Report
Told
Strict
Seen
Reports
Voice
Narrative
Found
Suicide

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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.
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During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.
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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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Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.
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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.
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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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I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.
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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.
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I was aware that you weren't supposed to write about suburbia, that it was undignified in some way, the subject matter not momentous enough. And so, for a long time, that kept me from writing about it. But once I began, I realized it was just as interesting as anywhere else.
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What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.
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The Pulitzer Prize is an idea it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
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The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.
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I wanted to be an actor. My parents were not too keen on that.
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Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking it's passage for some reason.
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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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that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep
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Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century.
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