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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.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Feels
Idea
Suicide
Going
Away
Quickly
Think
Ideas
City
Thinking
Firsts
Grow
Like
Everything
Cities
Evanescent
Book
Growing
Suicides
First
Grows
Perishing
Feel
Came
Detroit

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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.
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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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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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To start with, look at all the books.
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Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.
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it's amazing what you can get used to.
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No matter how long your've been at it, you always start from scratch.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.
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We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.
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Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly
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At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.
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I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants' as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.
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Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.
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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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There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.
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