The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

As long as I don’t know, I still have hope.”

“You’re not attracted to me physically. O.K., fine. But who says I was ever attracted to you mentally?”

She’d become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

I feel attacked

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 dry, 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.

as an eng lit major who didn't know where else to go, im absolutely gagged

“There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.”

Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.

So how male was that, to act like a winner when you’d just been creamed?

though objectification was de facto bad, the emergence of the idealized male form in the mass media scored a point for equality; that if men started getting objectified and started worrying about their looks and their bodies, they might begin to understand the burden women had been living with since forever, and might therefore be sensitized to these issues of the body.

“My goal in life is to become an adjective,”

Being fortunate had dulled her powers of observation.

And it was during this period that Madeleine fully understood how the lover’s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn’t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, that most solitary of places.

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.

Grief was physiological, a disturbance in the blood.

She didn’t want to be liberated from her emotions but to have their importance confirmed.

Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.

No one had an answer for the riddle of existence.

Every guy she’d ever been friends with had ended up wanting something else, or had wanted something else from the beginning, and had been friends only under false pretenses.

What could you do, when the retardant was also the accelerant? The lovelorn English major contemplated the symbolism of this.

It was possible to feel superior to other people and like a misfit at the same time.

“Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.”

“People don’t save other people. People save themselves.”

To feel so much was its own justification.

“I’ve been reading a lot of stuff on the body, and how the body has always been associated with the feminine. So it’s interesting that, in Western religion, the body is always seen as sinful.

“The whole thing about Judaism and Christianity,” Claire said, “and just about every monotheistic religion, is that they’re all patriarchal. Men made these religions up. So guess who God is? A man.”

The human mind can’t conceive what God is. God doesn’t have a sex or anything else.”

“Listen, a girl’s not a watermelon you plug a hole in to see if it’s sweet.”

Male oppression of women wasn’t just a matter of certain deeds but of an entire way of seeing and thinking.

Enlightenment came from the extinction of desire. Desire didn’t bring fulfillment but only temporary satiety until the next temptation came along. And that was only if you were lucky enough to get what you wanted. If you didn’t, you spent your life in unrequited longing.

He was sick of craving, of wanting, of hoping, of losing.

She had just started living like a grown-up and she’d never felt more vulnerable, frightened, or confused in her life.

MacGregor could also be opinionated and blunt. People didn’t like that in anyone, but they liked it less in a woman.

“If you want to have a career,” Alwyn said, “my advice is don’t get married. You think things have changed and there’s some kind of gender equality now, that men are different, but I’ve got news for you. They’re not.

“It’s never easy on a marriage when a baby comes along. It’s a wonderful event. But it puts a strain on the relationship. That’s why it’s so important to find the right kind of person to raise a family with.”

Madeleine was determined to ignore any subtext. She was going to be all text.

Funny

Like because I’m a mother he thinks I’m his mother. It’s so weird.

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

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.

The worst thing about religion was religious people.

Depression ain’t something you just get off of. You can’t get clean from depression. Depression be like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch where it hurts. It always be there, though.

It’s important for people in a relationship to have rules about the way they argue. What’s acceptable and what’s not.

If you grew up in a house where you weren’t loved, you didn’t know there was an alternative.

What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn’t like?

The problem is, no matter how much we try to be good, we cannot be good enough.

“I’m saying that it almost seems like you like being depressed sometimes. Like if you weren’t depressed you might not get all the attention. I’m saying that just because you’re depressed doesn’t mean you can yell at me for asking if you had a good time!”

In a soft voice edged with pity, with sadness, Leonard said, “I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee.”

“Madeleine thinks she can save Leonard,” she said. “But the truth is that he either can’t be saved or doesn’t want to be.”

How could you stay married to someone who didn’t want to stay married to you?