"'Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces - and as it gets older and stronger it will tear deeper - love her, love her, love her!'"
— Charles Dickens

"Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind."
— Jeffrey Eugenides

"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)

"But maybe the Charm Bracelets 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)

""it's amazing what you can get used to.""
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

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

"Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts."
— 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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities. Jimmy Zizmo, crouching over the Packard's wheel has already changed past understanding."
— 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)

"We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me."
— 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)

"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)