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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
First
Grows
Perishing
Feel
Came
Detroit
Feels
Idea
Suicide
Going
Away
Quickly
Think
Ideas
City
Thinking
Firsts
Grow
Like
Everything
Cities
Evanescent
Book
Growing
Suicides

More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

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I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.
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All wisdom ends in paradox.
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He knew a lot about his grandparents - and perhaps he feels he's been endowed with abilities to go into people's heads who are long dead - but, to a certain extent, he's making it up.
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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.
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no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.
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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'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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During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.
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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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You can tell when something's not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don't go away.
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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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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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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 couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.
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It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.
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The time has to be right and the heart willing.
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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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She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.
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Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.
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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.
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