Middlesex

by Jeffrey Eugenides

Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds. But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.

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.

According to Julie Kikuchi, beauty is always freakish.

“The matter with us,” he said, “is you.” And then he was gone.

There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich.

The Obscure Object and I met unawares, however, in blissful ignorance.

hadn’t gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it’s only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you’re time-traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

free will is making a comeback. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

Sex is biological. Gender is cultural.

A real Greek might end on this tragic note. But an American is inclined to stay upbeat.

There’s a kind of purity in that, the purity of childhood.

Grow up in Detroit and you understand the way of all things.

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It’s the thing that lets us say goodbye.