The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

This seemed to go well for a moment, standing up. Her head felt curiously light, as if hollowed out. But then the blood, draining from her skull like sand from an hourglass, hit a bottleneck, and the back of her head exploded in pain.

One of the nice things about being twenty-two, or about being Madeleine Hanna, was that three weeks of romantic anguish, followed by a night of epic drinking, didn’t do much visible damage.

English was what people who didn’t know what to major in majored in.

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

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.

Look, Chyzhova, this is about young us :3

The boys at college seemed either incredibly immature or prematurely middle-aged, bearded like therapists, warming brandy snifters over candles while listening to Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.

He had the wit of a store mannequin. But Dabney’s physical perfection pushed these realities out of her mind.

The pleasure Madeleine got from looking at Dabney was reminiscent of the pleasure she’d gotten as a girl from looking at sleek hunting dogs.

Wote for objectifying

disapproved of the idea of meaningless, extremely satisfying sex.

There there…

Derrida claimed that language, by its very nature, undermined any meaning it attempted to promote,

another of her rules was to never date guys who went to shrinks,

We can see how evolution happens here

alone in his apartment with his own disintegrating mind.

She wondered now, though, if his many-branching thoughts had in fact led straight to where he was now.

Sometimes I wonder the same and then recall that I wasn't THAT special

anyone with a verifiable mental illness.

V-e-r-i-f-i-a-b-l-e no shit

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.

Do I?

He complained that his brain wasn’t working

Not that uncommon, huh?

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

He was defective, and she wasn’t, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Oh, fuck off

He was under the impression, those first days, that mental illness admitted of hierarchy, that he was a superior form of manic-depressive. If dealing with a mental illness consisted of two parts, one part medication and the other therapy, and if therapy proceeded faster the smarter you were, then many people in the group were at a disadvantage.

TO be the best client of your therapist

My life getting better, but it ain’t getting any easier.

Leonard felt better around people who were struggling as much as he was.

Would I?

Who knew if this was a real emotion? Maybe it was just the drug doing something to him.

“Now I see why you got that magazine,” Leonard said, unable to keep from sounding bitter. “You’re hoping to find a cure.” “What’s wrong with that? You wouldn’t like to get better?” “I’m sorry that I suffer from a mental disease, Madeleine. I know it’s terribly uncouth. If my parents had only brought me up better, maybe I wouldn’t be this way.”

If you grew up with emotionally stunted parents, who were unhappy in their marriage and prone to visit that unhappiness on their children, you didn’t know they were doing this. It was just your life.

The problem with being Superman was that everybody else was so slow. Even at a place like Pilgrim Lake, where everyone had high IQs, the pauses in people’s speech were long enough for Leonard to drop off his laundry and return before they finished their sentences. So he finished their sentences for them.

to cash a traveler’s check was like passing before a series of demigods, one man to check your passport, another to stamp your check, another to make a carbon of your transaction while still another wrote out the amount, before you could receive money from the teller. Everything documented, checked over, scrupulously filed away, and then forgotten forever.

Like in Ukrainian army

It was as if Leonard had brought his hot, stuffy little studio apartment with him, as though that was where he lived, emotionally, and anyone who wanted to be with him had to squeeze into that hot psychic space too. It was as if, in order to love Leonard fully, Madeleine had to wander into the same dark forest where he was lost.

This—this mania—was different. Leonard seemed like an actual crazy person, and it scared her senseless.