Middlesex Quotes

“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

“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

“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
― 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

“Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.”
― 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 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

“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

“Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.”
― 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

“The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.”
― 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

“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

“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

“The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.”
― 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

“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

“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 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

“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