Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex (2002)

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But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant

Jeffrey Eugenides
All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!

Jeffrey Eugenides
Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.

Jeffrey Eugenides
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.

Jeffrey Eugenides
A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.

Jeffrey Eugenides
Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.

Jeffrey Eugenides
I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

Jeffrey Eugenides
My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.

Jeffrey Eugenides
I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.

Jeffrey Eugenides
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.

Jeffrey Eugenides