Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex (2002)

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It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Sourmelina's secret (as Aunt Zo put it): 'Lina was one of those women they named the island after.

Jeffrey Eugenides
There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said that the original human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That's why everybody's always searching for their other half. Except for us. We've got both halves already.

Jeffrey Eugenides
The humming of my parents' voices from behind my bedroom wall, which throughout my childhood had filled me with a sense of security, had now become a source of anxiety and panic.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.

Jeffrey Eugenides
The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

Jeffrey Eugenides
It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.

Jeffrey Eugenides
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.

Jeffrey Eugenides
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.

Jeffrey Eugenides
It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.

Jeffrey Eugenides
The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.

Jeffrey Eugenides
The only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream everyone has together.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

Jeffrey Eugenides
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
There is a small window of opportunity for freckled girls to tan.

Jeffrey Eugenides
A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.

Jeffrey Eugenides
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.

Jeffrey Eugenides
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.

Jeffrey Eugenides
No reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

Jeffrey Eugenides
The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.

Jeffrey Eugenides
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?

Jeffrey Eugenides
But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.

Jeffrey Eugenides
You used to be able to tell a person's nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that.

Jeffrey Eugenides
I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sku was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.

Jeffrey Eugenides
She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness", "joy", or "regret". Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions.

Jeffrey Eugenides