The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

College wasn’t like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.

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 beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable. *

engineering, spending the last period of total freedom in their lives doing nothing the least bit unordinary.

me duele

(She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you’d seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.)

he suffered from something that would never go away, something that could only be “managed,” as if managing, for an eighteen-year-old looking out on life, could be any life at all.

American women are all looking after themselves now. They’re basically all men.