Middlesex Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

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Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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 it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." 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." 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." 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 (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sky was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people-and especially doctors- had doubts about normality. They weren't sure normality was up the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
This can't be true but I remember it.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Pregnancy humbles husbands. After an initial rush of male pride they quickly recognise the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
We Greeks get married in circles, to impress upon ourselves the essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back where you began.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
We stood silent. After a moment I said, "Real Geniuses never think they're geniuses." "Who says?" "Me." "Because why?" "Because genius is nine-tenths perspiration. Haven't you ever heard that? As soon as you think you're a genius, you slack off. You think everything you do is so great and everything.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
When I think back about my immediate reaction to that redheads girl, it seems to spring from an appreciation of natural beauty. I mean the heart pleasure you get from looking at speckled leaves or the palimpsested bark of plane trees in Provence. There was something richly appealing to her color combination, the ginger snaps floating in the milk-white skin, the golden highlights in the strawberry hair. it was like autumn, looking at her. It was like driving up north to see the colors.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
German wasn’t good for conversation because you had to wait to the end of the sentence for the verb, and so couldn’t interrupt.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
That was the deal basically: catatonia without; frenzy within
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Parents are supposed to pass down physical traits to their children, but it’s my belief that all sorts of other things get passed down, too: motifs, scenarios, even fates.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Sourmelina's secret (as Aunt Zo put it): 'Lina was one of those women they named the island after.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Even the air seemed on fire, subtly aflame with energy as it does when you are young, when the synapses are firing wildly and death is far away.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Once you've visited the underworld, you never forget the way back.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Great discoveries, whether of silk or gravity, are always windfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Mr. da Silva had a relevant quotation for everything that happened to him and in this way evaded real life.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Pregnancy made her feel too much like an animal. It was embarrassing to be so publicly colonized.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
This whole country's stolen.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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 (Middlesex)
and you can feel it in the air, they way the air has somehow been keeping score.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
This is my country,' Lefty said, and to prove it, he did a very American thing: he reached under the counter and produced a pistol.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
He was filled with embarrassment: embarrassment for the human race, its preoccupation with money, it love of swindle.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
I went to church. It didn’t help. In those days that was the best place to meet a girlfriend. In church! All of us praying to be different.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
In the end he became as fragmentary as the poems of Sappho he never succeeded in restoring, and finally one morning he looked up into the face of the woman who’d been the greatest love of his life and failed to recognize her. And then there was another kind of blow inside his head; blood pooled in his brain for the last time, washing even the last fragments of his self away.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
The matter with us is you.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Whereas my grandfather was getting used to a much more terrifying reality. Holding my hand to keep his balance, as trees and bushes made strange, sliding movements in his peripheral vision, Lefty was confronting the possibility that consciousness was a biological accident. Though he'd never been religious, he realized now that he'd always believed in the soul, in a force of personality that survived death. But as his mind continued to waver, to short-circuit, he finally arrived at the cold-eyed conclusion, so at odds with his youthful cheerfulness, that the brain was just an organ like any other and that when it failed he would be no more.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
It was called evolutionary biology. Under its sway, the sexes were separated again, men into hunters and women into gatherers. Nurture no longer formed us; nature did. Impulses of hominids dating from 20,000 B.C. were still controlling us. And so today on television and in magazines you get the current simplifications. Why can't men communicate? (Because they had to be quiet on the hunt.) Why do women communicate so well? (Because they had to call out to one another where the fruits and berries were.) Why can men never find things around the house? (Because they have a narrow field of vision, useful in tracking prey.) Why can women find things so easily? (Because in protecting the nest they were used to scanning a wide field.) Why can't women parallel-park? (Because low testosterone inhibits spatial ability.) Why won't men ask for directions? (Because asking for directions is a sign of weakness, and hunters never show weakness.) This is where we are today. Men and women, tired of being the same, want to be different again.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
I never know what I feel until it’s too late.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Dr. Philbosian smelled like an old couch, of hair oil and spilled soup, of unscheduled naps.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
There was nowhere to go that wouldn't be me.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
My family suffered. My hair turned up in every corner, every drawer, every meal. Even in the rice puddings Tessie made, covering each little bowl with wax paper before putting it away in the fridge--even into these prophylactically secure desserts my hair found its way! Jet black hairs wound themselves around bars of soap. They lay pressed like flower stems between the pages of books. They turned up in eyeglass cases, birthday cards, once--I swear--inside an egg Tessie had just cracked. The next-door neighbor's cat coughed up a hairball one day and the hair was not the cat's.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Now I’ve given up any hope of lasting fame or literary perfection. I don’t care if I write a great book anymore, but just one which, whatever its flaws, will leave a record of my impossible life.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
In the Orthodox Church, we don't go for partial immersion; no sprinkling, no forehead dabbing for us. In order to be reborn, you have to be buried first, so under the water I went.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Figures. They let you in for free. Then you gotta pay for the rest of your life.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
If they were going to kill you, would they knock?
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities. Jimmy Zizmo, crouching over the Packard's wheel has already changed past understanding.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Sixty trillion years ago a god-scientist dug a hole through the earth, filled it with dynamite and blew the earth in two. The smaller of these two pieces became the moon.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Martinis in a can, Callie. We live in an age of wonders.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
In those days you could identify a person's nationality by smell. Lying on her back with eyes closed, Desdemona could detect the telltale oniony aroma of a Hungarian woman on her right, and the raw-meat smell of an Armenian on her left. (And they, in turn, could peg Desdemona as a Hellene by her aroma of garlic and yogurt.)
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Here's a question I still can't answer: Did I see through the male tricks because I was destined to scheme that way myself? Or do girls see through the tricks, too, and just pretend not to notice?
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Here it comes, I thought. The first ex-boyfriend had been summoned. Soon the rest would follow. They would file around the table, presenting their deficiencies, telling of their addictions, their cheating hearts... But that didn't happen with Julie. This was because Julie isn't husband-hunting. So she didn't have to interview me for the job.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Aphrodite put off her famous belt, in which all the charms of love are woven, potency, desire, lovely whispers, and the force of seduction, which takes away foresight and judgment even from the most reasonable people.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions. Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy". 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 (Middlesex)
And so now, having been born, I'm going to rewind the film, so that my pink blanket flies off, my crib scoots across the floor as my umbilical cord reattaches, and I cry out as I'm sucked back between my mother's legs. She gets really fat again. Then back some more as a spoon stops swinging and a thermometer goes back into its velvet case. Sputnik chases its rocket trail back to the launching pad and polio stalks the land. There's a quick shot of my father as a twenty-year-old clarinetist, playing an Artie Shaw number into the phone, and then he's in church, age eight, being scandalized by the price of candles; and next my grandfather is untaping his first U.S. dollar bill over a cash register in 1931. Then we're out of America completely; we're in the middle of the ocean, the sound track sounding funny in reverse. A steamship appears, and up on a deck a lifeboat is curiously rocking; but then the boat docks, stern first, and we're up on dry land again, where the film unspools, back at the beginning...
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the "Giulia" blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn't remember. Propellers churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began to spin. Red, yellow, blue, green, they untangled toward the pier, slowly at first, one revolution every ten seconds, then faster and faster as the boat picked up speed. Passengers held the yarn as long as possible, maintaining the connection to faces disappearing onshore. But finally, one by one, the balls ran out. The strings of yarn flew free, rising on the breeze.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
I'm quickly approaching the moment of discovery: of myself by myself, which was something I knew all along and yet didn't know; and the discovery by poor half-blind Dr. Philobosian of what he'd failed to notice at my birth and continued to miss during every annual physical thereafter; and the discovery by my parents of what kind of child they'd given birth to (answer: the same child, only different); and finally, the discovery of the mutated gene that had lain buried in our bloodline for two hundred and fifty years, biding its time, waiting for Ataturk to attack, for Hajienestis to turn into glass, for a clarinet to play seductively out a back window, until, comint together with its recessive twin, it started the chain of events that led to me, here, writing in Berlin.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Dear Mom and Dad, I know you’re only trying to do what’s best for me, but I don’t think anyone knows for sure what’s best. I love you and don’t want to be a problem, so I’ve decided to go away. I know you’ll say I’m not a problem, but I know I am. If you want to know why I’m doing this, you should ask Dr. Luce, who is a big liar! I am not a girl. I’m a boy. That’s what I found out today. So I’m going where no one knows me. Everyone in Grosse Pointe will talk when they find out. Sorry I took your money, Dad, but I promise to pay you back someday, with interest. Please don’t worry about me. I will be ALL RIGHT! Despite it’s contents, I signed this declaration to my parents: “Callie.” It was the last time I was ever their daughter.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Según mi experiencia, las emociones no pueden describirse con una sola palabra. «Tristeza», «alegría», «remordimiento», esos términos no me dicen nada. La mejor prueba de que el lenguaje es patriarcal quizá sea que simplifica demasiado los sentimientos. Me gustaría tener a mi disposición emociones híbridas, complejas, construcciones germánicas encadenadas, como «la felicidad presente en la desgracia». O esta otra: «la decepción de acostarse con las propias fantasías». Me gustaría mostrar la relación entre «el presentimiento de la muerte suscitado por los ancianos de la familia» y «el odio por los espejos que se inicia en la madurez». Me gustaría hablar de «la tristeza inspirada por los restaurantes malogrados», así como de «la emoción de conseguir una habitación con minibar». Nunca he encontrado palabras adecuadas para describir mi propia vida, y ahora que ya he entrado en mi historia es cuando más las necesito. Ya no me puedo quedar sentado a ver lo que pasa. A partir de ahora, todo lo que cuente estará teñido de la experiencia subjetiva de formar parte de los acontecimientos. Aquí es donde mi historia se divide, se escinde, sufre una meiosis. Noto más el peso del mundo, ahora que formo parte de él.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
(And did I mention how in summer the streets of Smyrna were lined with baskets of rose petals? And how everyone in the city could speak French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, English, and Dutch? And did I tell you about the famous figs, brought in by camel caravan and dumped onto the ground, huge piles of pulpy fruit lying in the dirt, with dirty women steeping them in salt water and children squatting to defecate behind the clusters? Did I mention how the reek of the fig women mixed with pleasanter smells of almond trees, mimosa, laurel, and peach, and how everybody wore masks on Mardi Gras and had elaborate dinners on the decks of frigates? I want to mention these things because they all happened in that city that was no place exactly, that was part of no country because it was all countries, and because now if you go there you'll see modern high-rises, amnesiac boulevards, teeming sweatshops, a NATO headquarters, and a sign that says Izmir...)
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)