Jeffrey Eugenides

“That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.”

“Mania was a mental state every bit as dangerous as depression. At first, however, it felt like a rush of euphoria. You were completely captivating, completely charming; everybody loved you. You took ridiculous physical risks, jumping out of a third-floor dorm room into a snowbank, for instance. It made you spend your year's fellowship money in five days. It was like having a wild party in your head, a party at which you were the drunken host who refused to let anyone leave, who grabbed people by the collar and said, "Come on. One more!" When those people inevitably did vanish, you went out and found others, anyone and anything to keep the party going. You couldn't stop talking. Everything you said was brilliant. You just had the best idea. Let's drive down to New York! Tonight! Let's climb on top of List and watch the sunrise! Leonard got people to do these things. He led them on incredible escapades. But at some point things began to turn. His mind felt as if it was fizzing over. Words became other words inside his head, like patterns in a kaleidoscope. He kept making puns. No one understood what he was talking about. He became angry, irritable. Now, when he looked at people, who'd been laughing at his jokes an hour earlier, he saw that they were worried, concerned for him. And so he ran off into the night, or day, or night, and found other people to be with, so that the mad party might continue...”

“Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he'd learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents' fighting: his laziness, his overachieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism.”

“What were he and his friends doing, really, other than hanging from a branch, sticking their tongues out to catch the sweetness? He thought about the people he knew, with their excellent young bodies, their summerhouses, their cool clothes, their potent drugs, their liberalism, their orgasms, their haircuts. Everything they did was either pleasurable in itself or engineered to bring pleasure down the line. Even the people he knew who were "political" and who protested the war in El Salvador did so largely in order to bathe themselves in an attractively crusading light. And the artists were the worst, the painters and the writers, because they believed they were living for art when they were really feeding their narcissism. Mitchell had always prided himself on his discipline. He studied harder than anyone he knew. But that was just his way of tightening his grip on the branch.”

“There were some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things. A Confession was a book like that. In it, Tolstoy related a Russian fable about a man who, being chased by a monster, jumps into a well. As the man is falling down the well, however, he sees there's a dragon at the bottom, waiting to eat him. Right then, the man notices a branch sticking out of the wall, and he grabs on to it, and hangs. This keeps the man from falling into the dragon's jaws, or being eaten by the monster above, but it turns out there's another little problem. Two mice, one black and one white, are scurrying around and around the branch, nibbling it. It's only a matter of time before they will chew through the branch, causing the man to fall. As the man contemplates his inescapable fate, he notices something else: from the end of the branch he's holding, a few drops of honey are dripping. The man sticks out his tongue to lick them. This, Tolstoy says, is our human predicament: we're the man clutching the branch. Death awaits us. There is no escape. And so we distract ourselves by licking whatever drops of honey come within our reach.”

“But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.”

“But by the time Madeleine reached the age that Alwyn had been then, she realized that her sister's iconoclasm and liberationist commitments had just been part of a trend. Alwyn had done the things she had done and voiced the political opinions she'd voiced because all her friends were acting and talking the same way.”

“It was probably true that he objectified women. He thought about them all the time, didn't he? He looked at them a lot. And didn't all this thinking and looking involve their breasts and lips and legs? Female human beings were objects of the most intense interest and scrutiny on Mitchell's part. And yet he didn't think that a word like objectification covered the way these alluring - but intelligent! - creatures made him feel. What Mitchell felt when he saw a beautiful girl was more like something from a Greek myth, like being transformed, by the sight of beauty, into a tree, rooted on the spot, forever, out of pure desire. You couldn't feel about an object the way Mitchell felt about girls.”

“He wanted women to love him, all women, beginning with his mother and going on from there. Therefore, whenever any woman got mad at him, he felt maternal disapproval crashing down upon his shoulders, as if he'd been a naughty boy.”

“Some people need a picture. Any great religion has to be inclusive. And to be inclusive you have to accommodate different levels of sophistication.”

“The window gave onto a view of dove-gray roofs and balconies, each one containing the same cracked flowerpot and sleeping feline. It was as if the entire city of Paris had agreed to abide by a single understated taste. Each neighbor was doing his or her own to keep up standards, which was difficult because the French ideal wasn't clearly delineated like the neatness and greenness of American lawns, but more of a picturesque disrepair. It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.”

“Remember that day you said you loved me? Remember that? See, you could do that because you're basically a sane person, who grew up in a loving, sane family. You could take a risk like that. But in my family we didn't go around saying we loved each other. We went around screaming at each other. So what do I do, when you say you love me? I go and undermine it.”

“She wasn't all that interested, as a reader, in the reader. She was still partial to that increasingly eclipsed entity: the writer. Madeleine had a feeling that most semiotic theorists had been unpopular as children, often bullied or overlooked, and so had directed their lingering rage onto literature. They wanted to demote the author. They wanted a book, that hard-won, transcendent thing, to be a text, contingent, indeterminate, and open for suggestions. They wanted the reader to be the main thing. Because they were readers.Whereas Madeleine was perfectly happy with the idea of genius. She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself. She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.”

“Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.”

“Almost overnight it became laughable to read writers like Cheever or Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about anally deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France. The reason de Sade was preferable was that his shocking sex scenes weren't about sex but politics. They were therefore anti-imperialist, anti-bourgeois, anti-patriarchal, and anti-everything a smart young feminist should be against.”

“To her surprise, Madeleine found herself contemplating this proposal. Why not tell her parents everything, curl up in the backseat of the car, and let them take her home? She could move into her old bedroom, with the sleigh bed and the Madeline wallpaper. She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.”

“Shit. What have kids got to be worried about now? If they want trouble, they should go live in Bangladesh.”

“You don't understand me. I'm a teenager. I've got problems!”

“They're just memories now. Time to write them off.”

“Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.”

“There's a time to talk and a time for silence.”

“Her face was calm, but inside she was tense.”

“It seemed like we were supposed to feel sorry for everything that ever happened, ever.”

“Eating is natural. Gaining weight is your choice.”

“She was always saying, 'Fuck this school,' or 'I can't wait until I get out of here.' But so did lots of kids.”

“Adolescents tend to seek love where they can find it.”

“In desperate moods he asked his mirror why the girl he was crazy about was the only girl not crazy about him.”

“I know what it's like to be high.”

“There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich.”

“She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand.”

“I do not think the patient truly meant to end her life. Her act was a cry for help.”

“When asked why she had tried to kill herself, she said only, "It was a mistake.”

“She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.”

“Every letter was a love letter.”

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

“But who knew what would happen once he got to Canada? Canada with its pacifism and its socialized medicine! Canada with its millions of French speakers! It was like…like…like a foreign country! Father Mike might become a fugitive over there, living it up in Quebec. He might disappear into Saskatchewan and roam with the moose.-Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides (2003), P. 507”

“There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.”

“To start with, look at all the books.”

“- - tämä kaikki on tuuleen huutamista. Itsemurhien ytimessä ei ollut suru eikä salaperäisyys, vaan silkka itsekkyys. Tytöt riistivät itselleen ratkaisut, jotka on viisainta jättää Jumalalle. Heistä tuli liian voimallisia elämään meidän keskuudessamme, liian itsekeskeisiä, liian näkemyksellisiä, liian sokeita. He eivät jättäneet jälkeensä elämää, joka aina siloittaa luonnollisen kuoleman jäljet, vaan mitä arkipäiväisimmän luettelon maallisia seikkoja: seinällä tikittävän kellon, keskipäivälläkin hämärän huoneen ja sen raivostuttavan tosiasian, että ihminen voi ajatella ainoastaan omaa itseään. Että häneen aivonsa saattavat sumeta kaikelle muulle, roihahtaa liekkeihin vain tietyissä täsmällisissä kohdissa, joissa kyse on henkilökohtaisesta kivusta, haavoista ja sortuneista unelmista. Kaikki lähimmäiset loittonevat kuin pieniksi pisteiksi valtaisan jäälautan toiselle laidalle, missä he heiluttavat pikkuruisia käsivarsiaan äänenkantaman ulkopuolella.”

“We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. 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.”

“Within the substandard construction of the Charlevoix church, literally upon a shaky foundation, I was baptized into the Orthodox faith; a faith that had existed long before Protestantism had anything to protest and before Catholicism called itself catholic; a faith that stretched back to the beginnings of Christianity, when it was Greek and not Latin, and which, without an Aquinas to reify it, had remained shrouded in the smoke of tradition and mystery whence it began.”

“Once you've visited the underworld, you never forget the way back.”

“Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists. The smartest guy in the honors program, Adam Vogel, a child of academics, was planning on getting a Ph.D. and becoming an academic himself. That left a large contingent of people majoring in English by default. Because they weren't left-brained enough for science, because history was too try, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical - because they weren't musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what they'd done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn't know what to major in majored in.”

“After all the screaming in our house, there reigned, that winter on Middlesex, only silence. A silence so profound that, like the left foot of the President’s secretary, it erased portions of the official record.”

“In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.”

“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.”

“But this was the thought of a depressive. An aspiring depressive, at the time. That was the odd thing about Leonard’s disease, the almost pleasurable way it began. At first his dark moods were closer to melancholy than to despair. There was something enjoyable about wandering around the city alone, feeling forlorn. There was even a sense of superiority, of being right, in not liking the things other kids liked.”

“Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope.”

“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.”

“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.”