Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
22 quotes
"It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies."
"The last thing the hockey ball symbolized was Time itself, the unstoppability of it, the way we're chained to our bodies, which are chained to Time."
"But maybe they understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing, I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar."
"The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars."
"My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood."
"Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds."
"Tessie allowed Milton to press his clarinet to her skin and fill her body with music. At first it only tickled her. But after a while the notes spread deeper into her body. She felt the vibrations penetrate her muscles, pulsing in waves, until they rattled her bones and made her inner organs hum."
"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."
"Judge Woodward envisioned the new Detroit as an urban Arcadia of interlocking hexagons. Each wheel was to be separate yet united. This dream never quite came to be. 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."
"I'm not sure, with a grandmother like mine, if you can ever become a true American in the sense of believing that life is about the pursuit of happiness."
"Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French."
"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."
"Desdemona, mourning her parents, was still imprisoned by the past. And so she stood on the mountain, looking down at the emancipated city, and felt cheated by her ability to feel happy by everybody else."
"Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling."
"I mean, in the end it wasn't up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to use before we're born."
"But as I peeked at my brother's inert body....I was aware only of what a strange thing it was to be male. Society discriminated against women, no question. But what about the discrimination of being sent war? Which sex was really thought to be expendable."
"A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts."
"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."
"This whole country's stolen."
"in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was no less than a guerrilla uprising.The Second American Revolution."
"If they were going to kill you, would they knock?"
"I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of a shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public."